‘The Cambridge Handbook of what?’, would have been the present reviewer’s response a little more than a decade ago. Then a fledgling linguist in his personal post-quantitative turn, today I was moving small bureaucratic mountains to be able to review The Cambridge Handbook of the Dictionary. In between are a decade and a half of sometimes reluctantly learning about dictionaries (they were and are not the go-to field for most eager young linguists). Dictionaries, however, are the topic of the current handbook, edited by Edward Finegan and Michael Adams, two of the stalwarts in the Dictionary Society of North America (DSNA). This review is, I am happy to say, favourable in appreciation of the achievement, which I will qualify throughout in minor ways.

The Introduction is followed by thirty-one independent chapters structured in six parts – in reality five parts and a single chapter on the future – which cover many bases: from dictionary typology (part I) to dictionaries as books (part II), products of ideology (part III), domains of use (part IV) and the business side of things (part V), before Gilles-Maurice de Schryver is assigned the impossible task to foretell the future of dictionaries (part VI). A daunting assignment, which de Schryver anchors in the late Sue Atkins, one of the visionaries of dictionary making, and finishes, very reasonably, with a call for trial-and-error dictionary product development that is driven by the results of dictionary user study: ‘just make the best possible dictionary tools; and study how they are used’ (p. 667).

But let’s start at the beginning. What we see in the first chapters, which include texts by Ammon Shea (‘Historical and other specialized dictionaries’, pp. 31–49), Kate Wild (‘Thesauri’, pp. 50–71) and Orin Hargraves (‘Commercial dictionaries’, pp. 72–89), shows rather nicely that dictionaries straddle the qualitative–quantitative divide in this confusingly diverse field in very useful ways. When Hargraves pronounces ‘that the value proposition of the dictionary, from a monetary point of view and whether you are the maker or the consumer, is finished’ (p. 88), he concludes that the field’s cash cow, ‘the commercial dictionary that enjoyed the central place in the home, school, and office libraries of the Anglosphere for more than 200 years is obsolete’ (p. 89), but without a sense of panic. Wild and Shea expound on two perennial issues of lexicography: the former on the two ordering principles of thesauri (alphabetic or conceptual) (p. 56), the latter (one of the few people to have read the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) cover to cover, Shea Reference Shea2009) on the role of consultants at the example of James A. H. Murray receiving bad advice on the staying power of appendicitis by a leading medical expert of the day, which led to the word’s exclusion in the original OED fascicle (p. 35). These examples show what might be called ‘the sense of principle and foible’ omnipresent in all dictionaries: the haphazardness of dictionary making within a highly regimented process.

Carla Marcello follows with a delightful chapter on ‘Bilingual dictionaries’ (pp. 90–108), Shigeru Yamada and Hai Xu with an insightful chapter on the ever-more important ‘Learner’s dictionaries’ (pp. 109–30) and Susan Rennie on ‘Children’s dictionaries’ (pp. 131–51). Dictionaries for children are perhaps the most difficult genre to write and no child’s play at all for the editor (but hopefully for the user). Learner’s and children’s dictionaries have been driving a lot of the innovation in much of the twentieth century, and are rounded off by a highly informative account by Elizabeth Knowles on ‘Dictionaries of quotations and dictionaries of proverbs’ (pp. 152–70) that culminates in the perennial question of ‘what readers really want’ (p. 165).

Part II puts the book aspects of dictionaries at the centre. Dictionaries are books that, as Landau (Reference Landau2001) so insightfully recounts, even experienced publishing houses greatly underestimate in complexity, the upfront cost and inevitable delays. Or take typography. While considered ‘a fundamental aspect of dictionary-making (Atkins 2008: 38)’, Michael Adams points out that little is said in the field beyond that blanket statement (p. 175; see ‘Dictionary typography’, pp. 173–88). Fittingly, chapters on ‘Illustrations in dictionaries’ by Michael Hancher and ‘Page and book design in dictionaries’ by Wendalyn Nichols follow, both detailing the areas that are vastly different from non-dictionary books (see pp. 189–215 and pp. 216–37, respectively). John Considine’s chapter is the first that introduces a tension in the Handbook that surfaces in a number of places and shows, in my assessment, the way forward: the non-Anglophone perspective. In the Introduction, the editors write about ‘the dictionary’ in the US tradition, with reference to its progenitor, the UK tradition. But that’s it, and if I were to point out an area that is not ideal at present it would be the monolingual focus that is somewhat inscribed. However, that focus is also diluted, at times quite heavily, and Considine’s chapter on ‘Dictionaries in book history’ (pp. 238–52) is the first in a long line of chapters (see below) that form the second half of the book and take a multilingual stance.

This is important, not just to satisfy what some call the ‘multilingual turn’ in linguistics and language study more generally (there is indeed lots to be unseated from a non-Anglocentric angle), but because the lexicographic tradition predates the English language by a few of millennia, when in ‘the late fourth millennium BC, in ancient Mesopotamia, at Uruk, then the largest city in the world’ lexicography was developed (p. 238). This tension, the Anglocentric versus the multilingual, can be felt clearly from this point on in most constructive ways. A good account of dictionaries as ‘material objects’ from the veritable US tradition is found in Lindsay Rose Russell’s chapter on changes over two centuries, with funny and quirky transitions from dictionary as text to dictionary as (Laurence Urdang) database, first for production only, and, with some delay, in direct sales of digital dictionaries (p. 258; see pp. 253–74).

While dictionaries are used and abused, as Russell points out, one such possible kind of ‘abuse’ is not tackled by Bryan A. Garner’s chapter on ‘Lexicography and the law’ (pp. 512–32). Garner’s chapter, instead, offers a most insightful comparison of the English dictionary tradition, usually taken to have started with Andrew Cawdrey in 1604, and argues convincingly that legal dictionaries, beginning with John Castell (1523) and John Cowell (1607), ought to be considered as part of that tradition (pp. 513–15). I agree. However, what judges do and do not do with dictionaries is not always in the spirit of the tradition. This information, however, cannot be found in Garner’s chapter but in David West Brown’s section on ‘Webster’s in the American courts’ in ‘Dictionaries, language ideologies, and language attitudes’ (pp. 277–300). Brown’s data shows the sky-rocketing use of Webster (dictionary) use in US federal court cases (p. 297).

Healthy critique of that juggernaut Anglophone tradition can be found throughout the volume in parts III (‘Dictionaries and ideology’) and IV (‘Dictionaries and domains of use’), which I shall discuss conjointly. We see scholarly critique that, more often than not, dictionaries often escape; for instance, in Russell’s second chapter, on ‘Dictionaries and cultural politics’, which points towards the OED’s Robert W. Burchfield’s ‘idiosyncratic style [that] has come under particular scrutiny’ (p. 312; see pp. 301–22), or in David West Brown’s assessment of the Anglo-East Indian Hobson-Jobson, documenting late nineteenth-century loanwords from the Indian subcontinent in English, that ‘those intertwined histories rationalize colonial authority’ (p. 287). We may further ask, for instance, why today much of World Englishes treats the English of India as if it were an essential, identity-confirming entity in India (as is the case in e.g. Hong Kong) rather than the necessary tool, the legacy of colonialism that, since it has been already ingrained with cane (Thiong’o) or colonial hierarchies or both, is part of these societies.

Dictionaries and the law make up a growth field in our litigious world. Michael Adams takes charge of that angle and informs us, for instance, how worried and ennuyé James A. H. Murray was when he discovered that a lot of his work for the OED had been plagiarized in the Century Dictionary, among others (pp. 631–2; see ‘Legal and ethical issues in dictionary-making’, pp. 630–48). Flash-forward a century and a bit and some lexicographers are pleased that their historical work was appropriated into a trade book by a Canadian comedian (Demers Reference Demers2025). Copying (with some form of attribution, as e.g. Demers Reference Demers2025: 207–8 did with DCHP-3, the third edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles) is the most sincere compliment. An insightful account follows by Adams on (US-American) trademark law vs ‘good faith use’, recognition of previous lexicographical achievements and ethics more generally, with great gain with frequent and useful sign-posting to Landau’s foundational oeuvre (2001, 1st edition1984).

Don Chapman’s chapter on ‘Usage in dictionaries and dictionaries of usage’ (pp. 323–42) centres usage, defined with Sidney I. Landau as ‘the study of good, correct, or standard uses of language’ (p. 323), in a useful four-tiered system of ‘good usage’, ‘actual usage’, ‘contextual usage’ and ‘traditional usage’ to offer, much like Curzan (Reference Curzan2014), a system to make sense of convoluted and at times conflicting notions of usage (in Curzan’s context: prescriptivism). He manages to pinpoint some Anglo-centrism, by pointing out that Steven Pinker’s notion of ‘common knowledge’ is not knowledge that is known by all but ‘that people assume is common to all’ (p. 329). This, of course, is the beginning of many problems with usage (any of the four kinds) and one root of the problem.

The second problem is language attitudes, which is addressed in Edward Finegan’s ‘Attitudes toward “the dictionary”’ (pp. 385–406). In broad strokes, readers get a good idea of the forces that dictionaries are the products of – nationalism (bad) and nation making (more reasonable), regional pride (reasonable) – and he cites interesting studies on how Europeans view ‘their’ dictionaries (pp. 392–4). As Ilan Stavans writes in his ‘Dictionaries as literary artifacts’ (pp. 481–92) so poignantly, ‘there is no concept of nation in modern time without language’ (p. 491). One might add: since 1789 (French Revolution, Coulmas Reference Coulmas1985). We read that ‘[n]either the French nor the Italians currently have strong views about their dictionaries as national symbols’ (p. 392), my interpretation would be, that is just because they do not feel threatened in their linguistic practice. The situation is different in Germany and Great Britain (UK), where users ‘did view dictionaries as national symbols’ (p. 394). One might add: in different ways respectively. In the UK, British (Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, English) identities are key, while in the German sense a deconstructed pan-German sentiment seems to lurk behind the insecurity (see Dollinger Reference Dollinger, Calabrese, Latorraca, Aiello and Geeraerts2026). This point on the biases in language study is stressed by Anatoly Liberman in ‘Linguistics and philology in dictionaries’ (pp. 460–80), as he reminds us of basic presuppositions in the field, as for instance here, that an 1882 English definition of philology, defined as ‘means to the whole moral and intellectual action of different peoples’ (quoted on p. 467), is a proxy for racist terminology that requires some untangling today.

The history of European lexicography has its darkest moments in its long-standing entanglement with nation making, beginning with the French Revolution and its creation of the French (see e.g. Coulmas Reference Coulmas1985). William A. Ross’ ‘Dictionaries in religious history and biblical interpretation’ (pp. 361–84) engages with such understudied aspects, which are still routinely left out in recent accounts on European lexicography. Ross’ chapter makes clear that there is little meaningful (historical) language study in Europe without an understanding of the juggernaut of Christianity (and literacy). While biblical or theological dictionaries were used to justify slavery, this is another developmental strand in German philology, which, from the 1860s to 1945 (Hutton Reference Hutton1999), was built on pan-German superiority and antisemitism (pp. 378–81). This tradition, sadly, did not end in 1945 but went into hiding behind ‘linguistic data’ and, till the 1980s, was taught by former Nazi lexicographer-linguists, with ramifications for today (Dollinger Reference Dollinger2025).

Katherine Connor Martin (‘Dictionary audiences’, pp. 409–20) and Carol Percy (‘Dictionaries as social history’, pp. 438–59) add key aspects to the thrust of the user/reader/target group approach: a ‘focus on dictionary audiences’, as a late eighteenth-century concept, allows a ‘broader social, political and economic’ view of the dictionary (p. 409). Martin traces dictionary user studies back to Clarence Barnhart in 1955, which is continued today in e.g. Lew et al. (Reference Lew, Grzelak and Leszkowicz2013) or Kosem et al. (Reference Kosem, Lew, Müller-Spitzer, Silveira and Wolfer2019) (the latter polling almost 10,000 respondents in 29 countries). There is much work possible today by harnessing online analysis of e.g. the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, which adds a new facet to the tradition, as are the ever increasing ‘Word of the year’ competitions, which now include the Canadian Word of the Year (Chew et al. Reference Chew, Dollinger, Ferrett, Ghorvei and Riehl2026) as its latest addition. Martin reports in a study over a recent two-year period concerning media controversies (p. 420), what Percy outlines in broader strokes since late Old English times: that social structure (family, gender, social status, industrialization, urbanization) leaves a clear mark on every aspect of lexicography. Her last point, racialization, for instance, is impossible without a racist, Arthur de Gobineau-type approach to people and, while racist terms ‘were registered belatedly in mainstream dictionaries’ – which amounts to the near erasure of the suppressed – every dictionary, of course, ‘represent[s] their society’s racial prejudices’ to a greater or lesser extent. In 1910s Canada, for instance, Siwash ‘wild one’ < Fr sauvage (DCHP-3, s.v. Swiash, n.) ‘was considered derogatory […] only when used to describe white people’ (Doherty Reference Doherty2020: 10).

Copyeditors occupy a powerful role that is often overlooked. In German-language literary publishing, copyeditors have assured for more than a century that Austrian writers replace their original Standard Austrian terms with those of Germany (e.g. Muhr Reference Muhr, Muhr, Schrodt and Wiesinger1995: 85). Since editors enforce the standard, Jonathon Owen’s words that ‘the descriptions found in a dictionary become prescriptions in the hands of copyeditors’ should sink in (p. 493, see ‘Dictionaries and editors’, pp. 493–511). How often non-dominant-variety speakers (e.g. Canadian English or Canadian French, Austrian German, Belgian Dutch, Catalan, Fijian Hindi or Canadian Hakka) have been undercut for the sake of consistency is anyone’s guess.

The Handbook includes a section on ‘The business of dictionaries’ (part V), with chapters on project management (Cathal Convery, pp. 535–61), the somewhat confusingly labelled ‘editing’ of dictionaries (Joseph P. Pickett, pp. 562–92), by which is meant the determination of scope, the headword lists and associated decisions, in the writing (my preferred term) of the dictionary. There are legal issues to consider, as Michael Adams reminds us in a chapter on copyrighted use, trademarks and the often lacking recognition of the people behind the dictionaries (pp. 630–48). He is not remiss in highlighting the connections between Merriam-Webster, the DSNA, Random House and other US publishing houses and academic traditions (p. 641), as the lexicographical world is a village. In ‘Publishing the dictionary: The business side of the business’ (pp. 593–629) readers get a gainful view from the US perspective by John Morse, who distinguishes phases of before and after 1847 (when the prototype of the US ‘unabridged’ dictionary was created with stereotyped printing plates and much reduced font and margins to cut the cost from $15 to $6 in 1847 dollars). The American Dictionary War between Worcester and Webster is retold with more nuance than in Landau (Reference Landau2001), with behind-the-scenes details on lobbying for Webster and slandering against Worcester (and, surely, vice versa), in a storybook case over market dominance (pp. 598–602). Dictionaries and capitalism might be another chapter for a revised edition. Not just survivors of the much more recent Canadian Dictionary War from the 1990s and early 2000s can relate to this (Dollinger Reference Dollinger2019). Via Webster’s Third (1961) and the missing label for ain’t – one word is, after all, enough to sink a dictionary – and the Great Recession of 2008 that reduced paper sales for Merriam-Webster, Morse enters the era of free online dictionaries with ads or subscriptions via institutions and the revamping with social media of the product lines of the Merriam-Webster company and their difficult relationship to and competition with Google.

At the end of it all, in his chapter on ‘The future of dictionaries’ (pp. 651–67), Gilles-Maurice de Schruyver’s calls for ‘joining forces with big data’ (p. 664), which might be complemented with equal justification by a call for refusing to work with big data for the obvious problems of letting AI run our dictionary-making portfolios. I think we need both, resistance and collaboration, and I hope that enough people will join either camp in an equilibrium. Finally, then, what does ‘the dictionary’ in the title relate to? The editors discuss their deliberate choice and produce a much better title than ‘Handbook of dictionaries in select languages with a focus on American English’, but that’s what we get and I’m richer for it.

Ah, the common noun dictionary. I remember asking Edward Finegan some years back whether the DSNA can be renamed without dictionary in the title. To his credit, he did not refuse to think about it, knowing full well, I now believe, that I wouldn’t be able to come up with a more suitable name. In a way, the notion of ‘dictionary’ should best be treated like the grouping of animals called fish, which ‘may not really be an independent type of animal at all’, as Adams mentions in his chapter on dictionary typology (p. 12), but a very useful ‘natural’ category. I would add: just like dictionary. Everyone has some idea of it. That alone is priceless. In Adams’ chapter, which is a (justified) homage to Yakov Malkiel, the readers may get their fill of meta-lexicography.

What could be improved in a new edition? Mostly things that are beyond the editors’ control: I’ve lugged the book around from home to work and elsewhere: with US$170 and fewer than 780 pages, wide margins and thick paper, it is twice the size and weight of Cosima Wagner’s Tagebücher, vol. 1 with 1,300 pages. As the feel (not the content) of the latter is more practical and also portable, I would hope that Cambridge University Press consider a more compact version of the Handbook, so that it may be used outside of (well-funded) libraries. That affordable vade-mecum version I would love to use as a textbook in my classes.