If you are even a minor word nerd, you have probably thought about the dictionary and how it gets made. Like anything, perfection is an impossible goal. There are even errors in the dictionary, but they tend towards the typo variety rather than factual errors.
I spoke to Kory Stamper, associate editor at Merriam-Webster, about editing the dictionary. The process has overlapping cycles, it seems.
“Proofreading the whole dictionary from cover to cover,” Stamper says, “is traditionally something we do when preparing a new edition, though that’s a gross oversimplification of the process.
How Many Edits Does it Take?
“Revising a dictionary happens in multiple passes,” Stamper says:
- a defining pass
- a copyediting pass
- specialty editor passes
- a cross-reference pass
- another copyediting pass
- a proofreading pass
- another cross-reference pass
- the final reader pass
- another proofreading pass…”
Imagine proofreading 3000 pages of four-point type on deadline! Typos are bound to slip through. Sometimes M-W staff find typos while using the dictionary themselves. Faithful users report them too. “We collect these reports, and then correct them when we get the chance,” Stamper says. In the traditional production cycle for a print dictionary, a typo report might sit for years.
“With a text this dense, 99.9% accuracy would mean approximately sixty thousand typos among some sixty million characters, but with the dual-keyboarding approach, the project yielded an accuracy rate approaching 99.99% accuracy.”
—Peter Sokolowski, on digitizing Webster’s Third (Tweet)
Quick Fixes, Sometimes
Even online products remain somewhat bound to production schedules. “Sometimes the data files are available and we can pop right in and fix it right away,” Stamper says. “Sometimes someone can report a typo and we can post a fix in the same hour. It’s pretty magical for those of us who are used to having to wait years to fix things.”
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Photo of woman in red dress by Adina Voicu from Pixabay. Photo of eyes peeking into tube of book pages by Florin Radu from Pixabay.
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