I treat dictionaries like I treat social science studies: I am highly skeptical and borderline dismissive of them, but I will cite them when they support what I understand to be common understandings. Farther has to do with literal distance, and further has to do with figurative distance, and if you use the terms differently you are contributing to confusion.
That’s… kind of disappointing.
Amongst
prescriptivist-oriented dictionaries (i.e., most English dictionaries, the
OED excepted), I’ve an exceptionally low regard for Noah Webster-linked volumes. This includes the Merriam-Webster lineage of dictionaries.
Why?
Webster took it upon himself to decide how to “re-imagine” established words in the English language (I’d throw out the hot take that he took it upon himself to dumb it down for a less-educated populace during the interwar years between the War of 1812 and the U.S. Civil War). His decisions on these spellings (and related grammar) was driven by a reflexively nationalist, reactionary bent, particularly in the window between 1806 (the year he published his first dictionary) and 1828 (the year he published an expanded version of it, one better associated with the Merriam-Webster lineage).
Webster was responsible for codifying into everyday language the fiction that organizations, companies, and corporations, following the Supreme Court ruling of the late 1790s, were indivisible “persons” whose pronouns were third-person it/its-
singular and not the sum of the people who comprise those entities (which would preserve use of the third-person they/them/their-
plural, which remains in widespread use for most English-speaking regions). This is a giant pet peeve of mine!
[Sorry, Apple and every U.S. corporation out there. You’re — ::
second-person voice:: — not a “who”. You’re a ”what” (as you’re nothing without the many people who do the work under your corporate name).]
And then there was Webster’s about-face backpedalling on the abolition of slavery, going so far as to admonish his daughter publicly, who was very much at odds with her dad’s U-turn into steeper racism. And yes, while throwing a contemporary lens on history often opens a different level of debate and critique, that he’d retreat wholesale during the 1830s, alienate his daughter, and then publish a history text omitting all mention of American slavery, already in progress (and even extolling the virtues of the “Supreme race” of “Anglo-Saxons” as the only true Americans in his history text) further undermines his standing as the American butcher of the English language, whose general spelling of common words (like “colour”, “judgement”, “manoeuvre”, “levelling”, and so on) are pretty much the same everywhere
except in the U.S.
::slow clap for our guy Noah, woo::
Getting back on topic, my go-to for English language dictionaries is the
Oxford English Dictionary as the sole reference text of the English language premised on linguistic
descriptivism and serving as a source of authority to account for the etymological roots and origin dates of a word or phrase (including English words which haven’t been used regularly for centuries).
In essence, each entry comes with a thoroughly researched history of the word itself. As a writer and sometimes-editor, that’s always mesmerized me. Consequently, the paper format of the
OED, whose core volumes (21) are appended with supplemental volumes as new entries are added, is still in its second edition, at over 20,000 pages. Sometimes, when I’m being dramatic, I will do the linguistic punctuation of the mathematical “QED”, by saying calmly, “The
OED has spoken,” followed by gently closing the hardcover volume.
For everyday use at my home office, I keep around the
Oxford Canadian Dictionary, the
Oxford Canadian Thesaurus, and the
Oxford Dictionary of Environment and Conservation (for the work and area of research I do).
Canada, as some probably know, exists in this curious grey zone between International/British English and American English, as some of the latter finds its way into use here (for example, we rely on the American-z —
zed — version for words like “realize” and “organization”). The reason for the Canadian edition is there’s a wealth of uniquely Canadian words, slang, phrases, and usage, as well as areas where that grey zone overlap happens. Heck, it didn’t even exist before 1998, but I’m so glad it does (thank you forever,
Katherine Barber).
tl;dr: The
OED is my go-to reference for linguistic descriptivism; the
Oxford Canadian Dictionary is my go-to dictionary for regional descriptivism
and everyday prescriptivism; while Merriam-Webster, lacking a life preserver, can go fall off a log floating down a turbid whitewater rapids somewhere in northern B.C. (And I say this as someone who was born in the U.S. and raised there.)
www.merriam-webster.com
www.dictionary.com
