Dictionaries are an ancient and ubiquitous genre, flourishing wherever and whenever humans flourish, but it’s important to remember that dictionaries aren’t products of human biology or necessity; they are products of human creativity and community: dictionaries are cultural and therefore political.  This chapter explores what it means to understand that simple fact. Dictionaries are partisan systems of ordering words and meanings.  They may aim to be universal, but they inevitably emerge from, record, and respond to social moments from particular perspectives.  Those perspectives may seek to celebrate or denigrate certain cultural groups, legitimate or suppress certain languages, facilitate social mobility or discrimination.  Dictionaries may highlight their cultural positionality as such for political or commercial profit, or they may cast their subjective styles as objective and universal for the same political or commercial profit.  In all events, dictionaries end up documenting cultural information in their definitions, usage labels and notes, illustrative examples and quotations, inserts and appendices, and beyond.  And, again in all events, dictionaries can have cultural impacts entirely unintended or unanticipated by their makers, running from the positive and life affirming to the dehumanizing and antisocial.

How are dictionaries shaped by social history, and how far do dictionaries themselves shape social history? Wordlists and dictionaries (broadly defined) reflect particular perspectives and may be adapted for new audiences. This chapter maps the most significant historical intersections of English dictionaries and Anglophone societies. It spans the shift from English as a colonized to a colonizing language, from the medieval period to around 1900. Its building blocks include intersecting conceptions of gender roles, the family, social status, work and industrialization, as well as urbanization and racialization. Some other concepts remain implicit. Education (inside as well as outside the home) interconnects every section. It was in religious contexts that Latin was codified and methods were perfected for organizing words within books as well as books within libraries. The idea of the nation was later shaped by the Oxford English Dictionary with history and by the state with nineteenth-century mass primary education. Overall, tensions between human agency and determinism are brought constantly into the foreground. The focus on English lets me contrast revisions of the ‘same’ text within the limits of a handbook chapter. My anecdotal approach relates social changes to identifiable revisions and initiatives by individual lexicographers.

The chapter addresses the notion of psychological harm inflicted upon consumers by AI systems. It ponders what phenomena could be considered psychological harm, analyzes how AI systems could be causing them, and provides an overview of the legal strategies for combating them. It demonstrates that the risk posed to consumers’ mental health by AI systems is real and should be addressed, yet the approach taken by the EU in its AIA Proposal is suboptimal.

Documents attitudes of makers and users toward dictionaries and analyzes attitudes of makers and users and the sometime tension between what users expect and makers provide. Dictionaries evoke strong feelings – often of respect, even reverence, sometimes of disrespect and outrage; they play an outsized role in people’s lives because of the profoundly intimate link between a lexicon and the culture and values of the society whose lexicon it is. A dictionary is viewed by speakers of the enregistered language as a mirror reflecting their culture, and by outsiders as a window into the culture. Creation of a dictionary is itself a kind of enactment – viewed, especially by speakers whose language has not been regarded as real or equal, as recognizing their language. A few nations have instituted academies to patrol their language, in part by crafting dictionaries. Dictionary makers’ attitudes are expressed in the frontmatter and, more reliably, in the entries and contents. In recent decades, users have addressed makers directly, insisting that dictionaries speak not only to their lexical needs but that they accurately mirror their social, political, and ethical values.

This chapter provides an overview of the process of conceiving, researching, editing, and publishing dictionaries, both synchronic (or commercial) and historical. Discussed methods and tools for making dictionaries range from traditional hand-copying of citations from print books and paper-and-pencil editing to sophisticated electronic technologies like databases, corpora, concordances, and networked editing software. The chapter shows how editorial conception of the needs and sophistication of the end user largely determines the dictionary’s length and headword list as well as the format, defining style, and level of detail in entries. The chapter goes on to examine how the pressures of commercial publishing, with its looming deadlines and pressing need to recoup investment by profits from sales, affect the scope of dictionaries and the amount of time editors can devote to a project, and how these pressures differ from those affecting longer-trajectory, typically grant-funded historical dictionaries. Assessing the consequent challenges for managing and motivating people working in these two very different situations, what may be the most important factor in a project’s success, concludes the survey of dictionary editing.

Copyeditors and proofreaders are some of the heaviest users of dictionaries, consulting them regularly in the course of their work, though little has been written on the influence of dictionaries on editors or of editors on dictionaries. Editors consult dictionaries on matters of spelling, capitalization, compounding, meaning, end-of-line hyphenation, and more. They may also disallow new forms or senses not found in a dictionary. Further, style manuals typically dictate not only which dictionary to use but how to use it, particularly on matters of spelling variants. Dictionaries thus become prescriptive tools in the hands of editors, despite lexicographers’ descriptive approach. There may also be something of a feedback loop between editors and lexicographers: because editors are gatekeepers of publishing, they have an outsized influence on what appears in print and thus what is recorded in dictionaries and therefore regarded as correct. Through dictionaries, copyeditors may therefore play an underappreciated and largely unexplored role in shaping standard English.

Throughout their history, dictionaries have been understood as sources of authority, whether that authority has been claimed by their makers or imputed by their audiences. In English-language contexts, that authority has taken various guises – moral, colonial, and legal, among others. Such authority rests, in part, on the linking of words, word forms, and grammatical structures to judgments about speakers, communities, and social relations. While those judgments have largely been aligned with codifying and maintaining a perceived “standard,” dictionaries have been sites of resistance, too. This chapter explores both assertions of authority and resistance. Given the long history of dictionaries and their substantial variety, the chapter adopts a case-study-like approach. It uses examples to explore how dictionaries have on the one hand upheld the civic, cultural, and social order, and on the other celebrated the linguistic practices and lexical innovations of marginalized communities and stigmatized varieties.

Law and lexicography intersect in various ways, involving intricacies in legal phraseology and semantics, the creation of dictionaries both legal and general, the evolving philosophies of what dictionaries should do, how lawyers and judges use dictionaries in their work, and even the settled doctrine that the drafters of legal instruments can be their own lexicographers. The two disciplines are perhaps as closely intertwined as any disparate disciplines can be – all the more so given the dramatic rise of textualism, especially in the United States, since the mid−1980s. Although Judge Learned Hand once cautioned that it is a mistake for advocates and judges to make a fortress out of the dictionary, that view has receded in recent years. If not a fortress, the dictionary is certainly a mainstay in modern judicial decision-making. The chapter treats the history of legal lexicography in Anglo-American law, the methods of modern legal lexicography, how courts use dictionaries, and how legal drafters engage in nonce-lexicography when preparing legal instruments.

The purpose of this chapter is to determine how the emergence of digtal delgates would affect the process of contract conclusion and how consumer law might need to be supplemented to strike an appropriate balance between utilising the potential for automation, where desired, with the ability of consumers to remain in control.

This chapter identifies three shortcomings in our preparedness for the governance of future worlds of consumers and AI. If our governance is to be smart, there must first be a systematic gathering of regulatory intelligence (to understand what does and does not work). AI givernance will require new institutions that are geared for the kind of conversations that humans will need to have in the future to adjust to a radically different approach to governance

This chapter argues that the influences on consumer choice should be revisited because the digital environment and the use of AI increase the urgency of having a clear criterion with which to distinguish permitted influences from prohibited ones. The current emphasis on either rational consumers or behaviourally influenced consumers operates with an ideal of unencumbered choice which has no place in reality and overlooks the fact that the law allows many subtle or not-so-subtle attempts to influence the actual behaviour of consumers. To effectively stand up to the force of AI-driven sales techniques, it may be necessary to update the existing framework of consumer protection.

With over 6,000 languages spoken worldwide and a history of colonialism and nationalism, people commonly have proficiency in the indigenous language of a region or of a non-localized minority group (ethnic, religious, Deaf, etc.), as well as in a national language. Monolingual or multilingual, dictionaries are products of their sociolinguistic environment. Though dictionaries may be treated by the public as a way to make the language into a static, bounded entity, lexicographers must contend with a lack of clear boundaries as to where their object languages end, given that their language communities include multilingual speakers. Despite this widespread bilingualism, language contact has not been thoroughly treated in English-language literature on lexicography. This chapter synthesizes the different ways that language contact manifests itself through dictionaries. It demonstrates that the asymmetry between the social standing of languages in contact manifests itself in the production and composition of dictionaries. It explores the difficulties that come with establishing the boundaries of the object language, with particular attention to Creoles and signed languages. The chapter details the problems that such difficulties pose to dictionaries of foreignisms. We conclude with an exploration of how language contact can and should inform the future of dictionary creation.

This chapter examines the effects that legally-oriented AI developments will have on consumer protection and to consumers’ need for legal advice and representation. The chapter provides a brief survey of the many possible ways in which AI may influence consumers’ legal needs. It provides comparative analysis of the benefits and risks of the use of AI in the legal sphere, discusses the state of regulation in this area and argues in favor of a new regulatory framework.

Dictionaries, both print and digital, rely on type fonts, styles, and sizes to make hierarchies of information within entries clear to dictionary readers. This chapter introduces a doctrine of dictionary typology: The more information of different kinds that a dictionary entry attempts to convey or the more information that readers of a dictionary entry try to manage and absorb – including relations among types of information – the more typography assists in the organization and reception of that information. A corollary principle suggests that the relative value of information should be emphasized typographically, as well. Besides its role in conveying information structure, dictionary typography also contributes to the aesthetics of the dictionary page, along with space, lines, boxes, and pictures of various kinds. Finally, while sighted persons understand typography through the eyes, blind persons know it through their fingers and construe information hierarchies differently, as a result.

A highly selective history of dictionary publishing in the United States, focusing on the sales, marketing, distribution, and financing of dictionaries, how they have changed radically over the years, but how many of the challenges remain the same. In doing so, the chapter illustrates the persistence of five constants that have shaped dictionary publishing in the United States. 1. Dictionary publishing has always been expensive. The factors driving that expense change over time, but even in the digital era there are no signs that it is becoming any less expensive. 2. Dictionary publishing has nearly always been highly competitive. 3. Dictionary publishing in the United States has always been aimed at the broad general public more than at the professional or scholarly market; hence, the dominant publishing strategy has been to lower prices in order to broaden distribution. 4. Technology has always been a driver of publishing strategies. 5. Aggressive sales and marketing have always been a part of dictionary publishing, but throughout the history of dictionary publishing in the United States, the one marketing strategy that overshadows all others has been effective brand management.