Ask someone to explain take and the task initially seems easy. Taking a book, taking a bus, and taking time all involve the same familiar word. Try separating its senses into definitions someone else can use, however, and familiarity becomes a problem. Which meanings require separate entries? Which differences belong only to context? Might the explanation be harder to understand than the word?

In Word by Word, lexicographer Kory Stamper describes spending about a month revising take. She also mentions an Oxford English Dictionary editor who spent nine months on run. The entertaining headline would be the time spent on a single word. More interesting is what that time contains. Little words we barely notice carry uses so practiced that we no longer hear their differences.

Published in 2017, The Secret Life of Dictionaries concerns work behind a reference book. Stamper, then at Merriam-Webster, describes entering the profession, collecting citations, writing definitions, handling pronunciation, and answering readers. Her colleagues are not enthroned authorities issuing correct answers. They read, distinguish, and become dissatisfied with the few lines they have just written.

Learning to Read a Sentence Again

Love of reading seems an ideal qualification. Stamper has loved words since childhood, including their unfamiliar sounds. Yet at the dictionary office she must learn another kind of reading. Following a story is insufficient; an ordinary verb in an unusual combination deserves attention of its own.

In an Articulate interview, she explains how the habit follows her home. Sometimes a first chapter needs several readings before she can stop gathering citations and read for pleasure. Narrative ordinarily makes words into transparent glass. Lexicography asks her to look at the glass.

Collected examples provide the basis for definitions. An editor cannot simply admit a word because it sounds interesting, nor suppress it because it is irritating. Where does it occur, how is it used, and is there enough evidence to distinguish established use from a single person's invention?

Readers want immediate certainty from a dictionary. Producing a dependable answer first requires admitting that personal familiarity is insufficient. That familiarity comes from particular schools, jobs, and reading habits. Language extends beyond all of them.

Take illustrates the difficulty. Synonyms are easy to list; a definition must encompass evidence without bundling unlike meanings together. Numbered senses look as if boundaries were always neatly present. Someone has compared many sentences to arrive at that provisional arrangement.

Evidence can also undo stories about new words. In a 2017 interview, Stamper discusses staycation. Critics could dismiss it as contemporary indulgence, inventing a grand term for staying home. She finds a 1944 beer advertisement presenting a holiday at home as economical patriotism. The older occurrence does not merely add a date. It unsettles the cultural judgment supposedly explained by the word's novelty.

A Word the Editor Dislikes

Stamper dislikes irregardless. It commonly does the work of regardless while adding a prefix many speakers consider redundant. Like others trained to detect the offense, she once found the word an easy occasion for judging someone's English.

Her job makes her return to evidence. People use it, and it did not originate yesterday in careless online writing. Disliking a form and deciding whether a dictionary should record it become separate questions.

She does not portray herself as naturally tolerant. Spotting mistakes once supplied confidence. Doing accurate work now requires relinquishing some of that confidence. Professional training adds knowledge while also exposing the shakiness of an earlier sense of superiority.

Inclusion does not make a word appropriate everywhere. Labels and usage notes help distinguish formal, informal, or nonstandard expression. Existence and likely effect in an application letter, assignment, or friendly conversation are different matters. Treating documentation as recommendation confuses both the language and the reference tool.

Correction can likewise serve different purposes. Helping a student communicate in a particular setting enlarges that student's options. Seizing on a mistake to ridicule someone often makes speaking harder. Stamper describes becoming better able to hear what people mean when she becomes less preoccupied with their errors.

This is not confined to English. An accent or turn of phrase can trigger rapid judgments about education and worth. The book offers no single answer to every language dispute. It does reveal a familiar substitution: how does a sentence I would not use become evidence that its speaker is not worth taking seriously?

Marriage in the Inbox

When Merriam-Webster's definition of marriage includes use for same-sex couples, objections arrive. Stamper handles correspondence explaining why the usage belongs in the dictionary.

Other editors added the sense; explaining it falls to her. A distinction made through citations becomes a dispute no definition can easily settle. Correspondents seek one kind of answer, while lexicographers are equipped to provide another.

Opponents often want more than a description of English. Inclusion appears to grant approval, while exclusion would withhold recognition. Stamper has to narrow the task: editors describe how people actually use marriage, not only what editors or letter writers want it to mean.

That restraint matters. A dictionary should not pretend to govern intimate relationships. Yet it cannot discard sustained usage merely to avoid controversy. It must remain answerable to the language it claims to describe.

Readers can pursue the question further. Whose language most readily becomes evidence? Who leaves abundant printed records, and whose speech seldom reaches an editor's usual materials? These are extensions of the book's problem, not proof that evidence is worthless. Possible omissions make wider collection and revision necessary.

The people using the word can disappear behind the argument. For an editor, marriage is a headword; for a correspondent, a cultural conflict; for another person, simply a word for life with a partner. Bringing those distances together explains why definitions need care and cannot entirely escape ordinary life.

Quiet Definitions, Lively Work

Word by Word is considerably less restrained than a dictionary. Stamper mocks herself, recounts professional embarrassment, and sometimes uses coarse humor. A reader seeking rapid vocabulary enrichment may find the route circuitous. She wants to reveal the hesitations concealed by an apparently uneventful entry.

Reviewer Jayne initially regards lexicography as an ideal job: paid reading all day. The protracted struggle with take changes her mind. Loving language can bring a person through the door without completing the repetitive, exacting, sometimes exasperating labor afterward.

Affection here includes investigating words one dislikes, admitting an initial explanation is inaccurate, and repeatedly rewriting something a reader may consult for seconds. The cleaner the result, the less visible the work tends to be.

Printed entries can never catch every new utterance. Stamper acknowledges that once an edition is finished and sent away, a brief pause gives way to renewed work. Language moves and the dictionary follows. Previous labor is not thereby pointless. A reader understanding a sentence now is already a useful result.

Afterward, a dictionary may feel different in the hand. It remains a tool worth consulting, but less like a code of laws completed before we arrived. Between its covers are diligent workers; outside them, far more people are speaking. The former try to keep a faithful record of the latter, and the story continues in that exchange.