dog \'do.g\ n, often attrib [ME, fr. OE docga] 1a: a highly variable carnivorous domesticated mammal (Canis familiaris) prob. descended from the common wolf; broadly : any animal of the dog family (Canidae) to which this mammal belongs b: a male dog 2a: a worthless fellow : b: CHAP, FELLOW <a gay ~> 3a: any of various usu. simple mechanical devices for holding, gripping, or fastening consisting of a spike, rod, or bar 3b: ANDIRON 4a: SUN DOG 4b: WATER DOG 4c: FOGBOW 5: affected stylishness or dignity 6 cap : either of the constellations Canis Major or Canis Minor 7 pl, slang : FEET 8 slang : something inferior of its kind 9 pl : RUIN <go to the ~s> 10 cap : any of various American Indian peoples - dog.like \'do.-.gli-k\ adj
As dictionary users, we may be so used to this format that we overlook its most distinguishing characteristic: it is extremely (some would say unreadably) dense. Specifically:
The layout for the definition for "dog" has no whitespace to speak of -- e.g., the various senses and subsenses run together instead of each being a new paragraph. Whitespace helps comprehension by having the divisions in the layout parallel the divisions in logical structure; this is why we have the concept of "paragraph" which at once conveys a division in thought and in layout.
There is extreme use of abbreviations in the above entry. Looking for what I would most prototypically call abbreviations -- i.e., bits of typography that I expand to full words when I read aloud -- I count these eleven: "n ME fr. OE attrib. prob. ~ usu. pl cap adj". The reader should note that none of these abbreviations are in wide use outside of lexicographic or perhaps linguistic work.
However, the delimiters of the various subsections can be considered to be abbreviations of sorts: a boldface number and/or letter, and colon, such as "3a:", are quasi-abbreviations for "New sense, number three-A". When a "slang" or "pl" or "cap" comes between the letter/number and the colon, these mean "New sense, which is slang,..." or "New sense, which occurs only in the plural..." or "New sense, which is written with an initial capital letter...", and so on. Similar quasi-abbreviations are: "\", used to bracket pronunciations; "[" and "]", used to bracket etymologies; and allcaps (e.g., "ANDIRON"), used to mean that the word in allcaps has an entry headword in the dictionary which the user is advised to find and read. All of these abbreviations and quasi-abbreviations must be understood if the user is to completely understand all the information that this definition seeks to convey.
Moreover, there is no use of metalanguage, as it is called in Rey-Debove (1971:43-52). Using metalanguage, instead of writing "dog \'do.g\", the lexicographer would write "the word dog is pronounced as \'do.g\". This tells the reader whether he should consider "dog" to mean the word dog (orthographically?), the sound of the word dog, the referent of the word dog, or the entry dog (as a cross-reference? in this dictionary or elsewhere?). Sophisticated dictionary users can grow accustomed to inferring which of these is meant, and several cues are given by typography. However, none of the typographic cues (e.g., allcaps for cross-references entries) are part of the general typographic conventions associated with the English language, and they are arbitrary and unintuitive; and the process of inference which users must rely on to understand these abbreviations is unreliable, as inference always is.
Consider then what the entry for "dog" might look like if whitespace were used, if abbreviations were expanded, and metalanguage were used:
dogI believe that this more clearly conveys exactly the same information as in the original, dense definition. Why, then, isn't this format, or something like it, used for definitions in print dictionaries? Obviously, because this format takes up a huge amount of space when printed on printed on paper. Landau (1984, especially pages 248-250) discusses how length of entries, the number of entries, and printing factors such as point size, line spacing, and whitespace must all be very carefully controlled, lest the lexicographic labors of years or decades end up producing a dictionary which is twice as large, heavy, and expensive as initially planned -- and therefore at least twice as unsellable.The word "dog" is pronounced as \'do.g\
This entry defines the word "dog" when used as a noun.
The word "dog" occurs in Middle English, and is derived from the Old English docga
Senses:
Sense 1a: in this sense, "dog" refers to a highly variable carnivorous domesticated mammal whose scientific name is Canis familiaris. This animal is probably descended from the common wolf.
In a broader sense, this can refer to any of the dog family (whose scientific name is Canidae) to which the domesticated dog belongs.Sense 1b: The word "dog" in this sense refers to a male dog.
Sense 2a: The word "dog" in this sense is synonymous with "a worthless fellow".
Sense 2b: The word "dog" in this sense is synonymous with the words "chap" or "fellow". (We recommend reading the entries for these words in this dictionary.) An example usage of this sense is the phrase "a gay dog".
Sense 3a: The word "dog" in this sense refers to any of the various, usually mechanical, devices for holding, gripping, or fastening consisting of a spike, rod, or bar.
Sense 3b: The word "dog" in this sense is synonymous with the word "andiron", which there is an entry for in this dictionary.
Sense 4a: The word "dog" in this sense is synonymous with the phrase "sun dog", which there is an entry for in this dictionary.
Sense 4b: The word "dog" in this sense is synonymous with the phrase "water dog", which there is an entry for in this dictionary.
Sense 4c: The word "dog" in this sense is synonymous with the word "fogbow", which there is an entry for in this dictionary.
Sense 5: the word "dog" in this sense refers to affected stylishness or dignity
Sense 6: This sense is always written capitalized. "Dog" in this sense refers to either of the constellations Canis Major or Canis Minor
Sense 7: This sense is found only in slang, and occurs only in the plural. In this sense, "dogs" means "feet", which there is an entry for in this dictionary.
Sense 8: The word "dog" in this sense refers to something inferior of its kind.
Sense 9: This sense is found only in the plural in the expression "go to the dogs", which means "be ruined". There is an entry for "ruin" in this dictionary.
Sense 10: This sense is always written capitalized. In this sense, "Dog" can refer to any of the various American Indian peoples.
The word "dog" has the derivative doglike, which is an adjective, and which is pronounced \'do.-.gli-k\
Almost every criticism made of dictionaries comes down at bottom to the lexicographer's need to save space. The elements of style that so baffle and infuriate some readers are not maintained for playful or malicious reasons or from the factotum's unthinking observance of traditional practice. They save space. Every decision a lexicographer makes affects the proportion of space his dictionary will allot to each component. It is perfectly fair for critics to question his judgement, but they must realize that the length of a dictionary is finite, and as large as it may appear to them, it is never large enough for the lexicographer. [Landau 1984:87]
Any dictionary which formats an entry for "dog" as I've done above would be clearer and more comprehensible than the denser ways of formatting it, but I estimate that it would be at least five times as large. Merriam-Webster (1963) is already an immense volume, and as such already has a limited market; multiplying its size, weight, and cost by five would make it undesirable to what market Webster's Seventh already has. And so print dictionaries must use dense formatting because of the need to save page space, with consequences for readability.
What are the ramifications of this new luxury of space? In terms of microstructure, it means that my verbose and unabbreviated entry for "dog", above, may be preferable to the dense and obscurely abbreviated Webster's 7th formatting. At the very least, online versions of print dictionaries no longer have any compelling reason to use abreviations; abbreviations should be expanded. This is a trivial task which can even be performed as part of the interface routines which display entries. For example, to expand all instances of "n." to "noun" in a given entry can be done in a single line of code in a PERL program:
$entry =~ s/\bn\./noun/g;webster (Unknown ?1983)
for example, is still thick with abbreviations,
a reflection of the fact that is merely a keying in of a print
dictionary (i.e., Merriam-Webster 1963).
Webster New World Dictionary, Third Edition, with the
American Concise Encyclopedia on Power CD (ZCI Publishing
1995) and The American Heritage Talking Dictionary, Third
Edition (American Heritage 1994)
are just as filled with abbreviations as their print sources.
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Deluxe Electronic
Edition (Merriam-Webster 1994) seems to expand its abbreviations,
but beyond this, entries are exactly as they would appear in print.
Just as abbreviations can be automatically expanded, so can formatting codes be easily changed. This may be a more complex task, depending on the markup language the lexicon is coded in, but it is feasible in most cases. For example, in the experimental electronic version of Young & Morgan (1992) which I have produced, the Hypertext Markup Language tag "<P>" is added after every instance of the tag which ends every list of subentries. This <P> tag adds whitespace to the entries to make the divisions between sections clearer.
In a user-friendly online lexicon of such a morphologically complex language, it would be useful to the non-expert user to offer a more expanded sample of the inflection of the headword in question. In Latin, for example, there are only two grammatical numbers (i.e., singular and plural) and, for most nouns, five cases; so the entire declensional possibilities of "mos/moris" can be shown in a small table. In a language where the number of possible inflected forms of a root is orders of magnitude larger than the ten forms of most Latin nouns, it would still be pedagogically useful to represent at least the most frequently used forms and have the rest be viewable if the user desires them.
These forms need not even be coded in the underlying structure of the dictionary; instead, if the morphology of the language can be modeled in the programming of the lexicon's interface, then it can be left up to the programming to determine how, for example, "mos/moris" is to be declined, and to display these forms to the user as a part of the routine which retrieves entries from the lexical database.
More information would be useful for interpretation of some of the metaphorical uses of "dog" the user might encounter: dogs are often considered exceedingly loyal (as typified in the expression "a dog is a man's best friend"); they are sometimes considered ugly or dirty animals (cf. calling an unattractive woman a "dog", or in the saying "a dog's life"), and so on. Wierzbicka (1985:169-171) lists literally dozens of other attributes (which she calles "formulae") which are not merely true about dogs, but which are necessary to an understanding of what a dog is, for the purpose of making sense of the word when it is heard. She then makes these crucial comments, well worth repeating in full:
The definitions [for "dog" and other animal-words --SB] proposed here state the semantic competence of native speakers, which a language learner must acquire. Hunn (197[6]:24) has insisted that statements which formulate native speakers' semantic knowledge are not to be called 'definitions' but 'descriptions'. I do not want to argue about terminology. I understand, of course, that the length of my formulae makes them look different from conventional definitions. I would insist, however, that whatever they are called, they explicate the linguistic competence that native speakers of English have and that they are, therefore, a necessary part of a complete description of English. They differ fundamentally from language-independent knowledge about animals that compendia such as the Encyclopaedia Brittanica seek to state. In any case the idea that there is some theoretically defensible model of conventional definitions, short and yet accurately reflecting a word's use, is a characteristic illusion of specialists in other disciplines. [Wierzbicka 1985:171]The pragmatically-minded reader might at this point wonder why one would need to bother defining "dog" at all. In fact, there is some historical precedent here:
Al-Fîrûzâbâdî [Majd al-Dîn Muhammad ibn Ya`qûb Al-Fîrûzâbâdî, a fourteenth and fifteenth century (AD) Arabic lexicographer, author of al-Qâmûs al-Muhît --SB] used five letters as abbreviations: [the first being] the letter mîm, meaning "ma`rûf" (known), to avoid defining such common words as palm, bee, house, horse, and so on; previous lexicographers have frequently either given no definition, or written "ma`rûf" in full. Sometimes they had used some meaningless formula, such as "man-- the singular of men"! [Haywood 1965:86]Depending on the purposes a given dictionary is expected to serve, this approach of simply leaving out some basic words may be wise. For example, a dictionary of electrical engineering probably should not be expected to contain a definition for "electricity" useful to the layman, since having and using such a dictionary presupposes that user has enough knowledge of electrical engineering that he doesn't need to be told what electricity is.
However, if a lexicon is going to bother to compose a definition for "dog" in its most basic sense, as Merriam-Webster (1963) does, and if it has effectively no limitations on space or layout, as is the case with online lexicons, then there's no good reason why it shouldn't give salient background information along the lines of at least some of Wierzbicka's "formulae", about what one needs to know about dogs to make sense of uses of the English word "dog". This may seem pointless for as ubiquitous and well known a word (and referent) as "dog", but for less common words, it is necessary. I will use "spittoon" as an example here.
"Spittoon" is uncommon enough of a word that it might send many people to the dictionary. "Spittoon" is defined in Merriam-Webster (1963:844) this way:
spit.toon \spi-'tu:n, sp*-\ n. [spit + -oon (as in balloon)] : a receptacle for spit -- called also cuspidor
This definition says nothing untrue; it does say what spittoons are for (as opposed to, for example, the definition for "talc" which says nothing about the salient uses of it). However, in light of Robinson's adage (1954:56, as above), let's consider how this entry could be truer by being longer.
First, to be aware of the meanings and associations that "spittoon" has when used, a reader must know that spittoons were formerly quite common, as it was once quite common to chew tobacco. Moreover, the reader must know (or should now be told) that in the twentieth century, the habit of chewing tobacco has become rare, so that a spittoon is now considered to be a quaint artifact of the everyday life of another time, like inkwells, or wooden steamer trunks -- and, as such, they are more likely to be used as decorative bric-a-brac which are not to be spit into.
This is not to suggest that lexicographers working on Merriam-Webster (1963) were oblivious to these facts about spittoons; but instead that they had to suppress them for reasons of brevity, which was more necessary than completeness. However, in online lexicons, brevity is no longer as crucial, leaving completeness the prime virtue in definitions.
One may object that such "completeness" would be an exercise in pointless verbosity. This may well be the case with a monolingual dictionary like Merriam-Webster (1963), where the intended users are of the same culture as the one the language is traditionally spoken in. (In fact, I genuinely wonder who looks up "dog" in a monolingual English dictionary and what they expect to find.) However, when producing a lexicon of a language whose expected audience includes a good number of people from a different culture than the culture of speakers of that language (as is the case with Young & Morgan 1992, for example), one cannot assume that Wierzbicka-style "formulae" relevant to the language and culture in question are old news to the users of the lexicon. Failing to state at least the more informative formulae (e.g., that a given word refers to a plant that is widely known for its curative properties, or usefulness as a spice, etc.; or that a given culture considers dogs as pests, not pets) can result in unrevealing entries which are at best cryptic (as in the all-too-common case of lexicons of Native language where a Native word is glossed merely with a Linnean genus and species name, often with no hint of even whether it is a plant or animal), and at worst inviting cultural misunderstanding (e.g., failing to note that the referent of a given word is not considered a polite topic of conversation in the culture in question).
But in practical terms, if I have read this textual entry, could I recognize a spittoon if I saw one, or would I mistake it for an empty flowerpot or the like? Illustrations are very useful here; simply including a photograph of a typical-looking spittoon, sitting on the floor, would be very instructive as a supplement to (or even a replacement for) a written description of the shape and size of a spittoon.
Of course, illustrations or photographs are by no means new to online dictionaries. However, consider Svensén's warnings to makers of print dictionaries: "The use of colours [in illustrations] other than black is an expensive process, which should be considered only when it is absolutely necessary." (1993:170) In online media, however, it is just as easy to embed a color image in an entry as it is to embed a black and white one, and this involves no special production costs or difficulties beyond that of procuring a suitable photograph or illustration. As Svensén notes, color illustrations and color photos are indispensible for conveying the meaning of color words, and in differentiating some kinds of plants and animals (e.g., limes from lemons, or weasels from minks). And illustrations in general are useful for conveying the appearance of the referent where this is especially salient, as it is in distinguishing breeds of dogs, species of trees, types of chess pieces, architectural terms, and so on; or in conveying the names of the various parts of a thing (e.g., labeling the parts of a flowering plant).
The media possibilities of print dictionaries are confined to text plus illustrations (whether line-drawings, photographs, maps, or diagrams) for these are about all that is possible with print. (Presumably a pop-up book or scratch-and-sniff dictionary is not feasible or especially desirable.) However, any number of media types can be used in online lexicons, notably sound clips and even short video clips.
The most obvious use of these multimedia capabilities is to convey the pronunciation of entries, instead of through the awkward symbology print dictionaries use. The American Heritage Talking Dictionary, Third Edition (American Heritage 1994) is an example of a dictionary which implements sound clips for this purpose.
But in addition to sound clips of word pronunciation,
for some words there may be call for clips of the sound that the
referent makes. Consider this entry from the Internet
webster version (Unknown ?1983) of Merriam-Webster
(1963):
ci.ca.da \s*-'ka-d-*, -'ka.d-\ n [NL, genus name, fr. L, cicada] : any of a family (Cicadidae) of homopterous insects with a stout body, wide blunt head, and large transparent wings.None of the facts in this definition are as salient as as the sound that cicadas make. (In fact, this is an undeniably bad definition because it fails to mention that they make any sound at all.) In an online lexicon, it would be simple to embed a sound clip that would enable users to hear the sound of cicadas, because knowing this sound is a crucial part of the linguistic competence (in the sense Wierzbicka uses this term) necessary to knowing what, in practical real world terms, the word "cicada" means.
For example, depending on the preferences one chooses, the server will deliver the entry for "cão" (meaning "dog") with abbreviations expanded, and with no etymology, as here:
Or, alternately, abbreviations can be left intact, and the etymology can be provided:
- cão
- 1.
- substantivo masculino
- (zoologia) mamífero carnívoro, da família dos Canídeos, domesticado desde a antiguidade e de origem discutível, representado por numerosas raças das mais diversas utilidades;
- (Brasil) cachorro;
- peça de percussão, nas armas de fogo portáteis;
- pedra saliente, nas paredes, para suster balcões;
- (astronomia) constelação austral (nesta acepção, grafa-se com inicial maiúscula);
- (popular) calote;
- homem de maus fígados;
- homem desprezível.
- 2.
- substantivo masculino
- príncipe ou chefe asiático;
- mercado ou estalagem no Oriente.
- 3.
- adjectivo
- branco. Feminino singular cã; feminino plural cãs; masculino plural cãos.
(Do lat. cane-, "cão")
- cão
- 1.
- s. m.
- (zool.) mamífero carnívoro, da fam. dos Canídeos, domesticado desde a antiguidade e de origem discutível, representado por numerosas raças das mais diversas utilidades;
- (Bras.) cachorro;
- peça de percussão, nas armas de fogo portáteis;
- pedra saliente, nas paredes, para suster balcões;
- (astr.) constelação austral (nesta acepção, grafa-se com inicial maiúscula);
- (pop.) calote;
- homem de maus fígados;
- homem desprezível.
(Do tártaro khán, "príncipe; senhor")
- 2.
- s. m.
- príncipe ou chefe asiático;
- mercado ou estalagem no Oriente.
(Do lat. canu-, "branco")
- 3.
- adj.
- branco.
- Fem. sing. cã; fem. pl. cãs; masc. pl. cãos.
By using configurability options like this, the same dictionary can be made to serve varied audiences. For example, while I was producing an experimental online version of Young & Morgan (1992) during the summer of 1996, several Navajo teachers I consulted with expressed the view that the etymology paragraphs that start many of the entries in Young & Morgan (1992) should be suppressed for beginning and intermediate students using the online lexicon -- for whom the etymologies would be at best useless, and at worst confusing -- but that they should be viewable to advanced students, teachers, linguists, and other sophisticated users.
Similarly, one could suppress senses of a definition which are obsolete or which belong to jargon (as with "dog" in the sense 3a and 3b, above).
Besides optionally suppressing information for classes of users unlikely to find it useful, there is the important possibility of differently ordering the information in an entry. When ordering senses in an entry, almost all print dictionaries fall into two groups: those that order on historical principles (the oldest meaning coming first), and those that put the most "important" meaning first, where importance is generally based on considerations of frequency in common usage (Svensén 1993:213). Ordering based on historical principles is useful if the user needs information about sense development or about which sense to expect in a centuries-old text; but the historical ordering is likely to confuse many users, who naturally expect the most useful information to be at the start of the entry. An apt solution for online lexicons is to specify both orderings (historical and importance-based) in the coding for entries, and have it be configurable for each user which ordering he wants the senses to appear in on the screen.
Slate (1989, 1997) points out that customizability can be extended to the presentation of the morphological analysis within the lexicon. While a morphological analysis of a headword in a morphologically complex language may be indispensible to learners or linguists of the language, native speakers of the language may find it at best self-evident and at worst distracting.
Similarly, the phonological and phonetic representations of headwords or examples, if present in the lexicon, could be searchable and presentable as the user wishes. A user should be able to view the phonological form of a given entry at varied levels of realization, or possibly according to varied analyses. For example, a user searching for the occurrence of a phoneme/phone pattern in the content of an entry should be able to specify whether this pattern should be sought in an abstract phonological form of the headwords or examples (and if so, in whose analyses), or in more fleshed-out phonetic realizations of them. The amount of programming necessary to model phonological/phonetic rules and to convert between different analyses may be simple, or may be monumental, depending on the complexity of the analyses in question; but once such programming is in place, an interested user may be able to easily answer such questions as (to use a Mingo example) "What verb roots have, in their underlying form, an /u/ which, in the surface form of that root conjugated in the first-person-singular optative, would immediately precede a stressed vowel?" The ability to formulate and answer such questions will no doubt greatly aid phonological/phonetic research.
Configurability could even extend to issues of writing systems. For languages where there is consistent variance in spelling (as between American and British spelling; or in cases where two writing systems are involved, as with Mongolian, which can written in Cyrillic or in Old Script), it should be possible to model this variance in the programming for the interface, such that the same entry could be displayed to the user in the writing system of his choice. Such automatic transliteration would be especially welcome in the case of Native American languages, where the number of varied writing systems for each language has thus far greatly complicated even the most basic tasks of linguistic research.