It is widely believed that every word has a correct meaning, that we learn these meanings principally from teachers and grammarians, and that dictionaries and grammars are the supreme authority in matters of meaning and usage. Few people ask by what authority the writers of dictionaries and grammars say what they say. I once got into a dispute with an Englishwoman over the pronunciation of a word and offered to look it up in the dictionary. The Englishwoman said firmly, ”What for? I am English. I was born and brought up in England. The way I speak is English.” Such self-assurance about one's own language is not uncommon among the English. In the United States, however, anyone who is willing to quarrel with the dictionary is regarded as either eccentric or mad.
Let us see how dictionaries are made and how the editors arrive at definitions. The task of writing a dictionary begins with reading vast amounts of the literature of the period or subject that the dictionary is to cover. As the editors read, they copy on cards every interesting or rare word, every unusual or peculiar occurrence of a common word, a large number of common words in their ordinary uses, and also the sentences in which each of these words appears.
To define a word, then, the dictionary-editor places before him the stack of cards illustrating that word; each of the cards represents an actual use of the word by a writer of some literary or historical importance. He reads the cards carefully, discards some, rereads the rest, and divides up the stack according to what he thinks are the several senses of the word. Finally, he writes his definitions, following the bard-and-fast rule that each definition must be based on what the quotations in front of him reveal about the meaning of the word. The editor cannot be influenced by what he thinks a given word ought to mean. He must work according to the cards or not at all.
The writing of a dictionary, therefore, is not a task of setting up authoritative statements about the ”true meanings” of words, but a task of recording, to the best of one's ability, what various words have meant to authors in the distant or immediate past. The writer of a dictionary is a historian, not a lowgiver. If, for example, we bad been writing a dictionary in 1890, or even as late as l919, we could have said that the word ”broadcast” means ”scatter” (seed, for example), but we could not have decreed that from l921 on, the most common meaning of the word should become ”to send out everywhere audible messages, etc., by radio transmission.” To regard the dictionary as an ”authority,” therefore, is to credit the dictionary-writer with the gifts of prophecy which neither he nor anyone else possesses. In choosing our words when we speak or write, we can be guided by the historical record afforded us by the dictionary, but we cannot be bound by it, because new situations, new experiences, new inventions, new feelings are always compelling us to give new uses to old words. Looking under a ”hood,” we should ordinarily have found, five hundred years ago, a monk; today, we find a motorcar engine･