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.

“The dictionary” – the idiom is so thoroughly established that we could not avoid using it in the title of this book, the Cambridge Handbook of the Dictionary, even though the book’s purpose is to undermine the restrictive force of that the. The dictionary identifies a genre, type, or medium, like the novel, the symphony, or the movies, but there is a difference: we say, when someone has a question about a word, “Look it up in the dictionary!” yet no one with a question about moral character says, “Look it up in the novel!” or, about orchestration, “Look it up in the symphony!” In fact, there are many types of dictionary, many different dictionary examples of each type, and for practical purposes an inexhaustible number of dictionaries to consult on almost any question about any word. “The dictionary” is reductive. This handbook is correspondingly and correctively expansive in its understanding of dictionaries.

The fundamental task of a general-purpose dictionary is to identify the words of a language, describe their actual use in speech and writing, and report what use shows about meanings. Supplementary—and controversial—tasks include describing social attitudes toward disputed usages and prescribing ‘correct’ usage. Dictionaries differ in the degree to which they honour the supplementary tasks. Some limit descriptions of status to labels attached to particular words or senses; others offer expansive guidance in usage notes appended to dictionary entries. Usage notes themselves differ—some implicitly prescribing as well as describing usage, others restricted to description of attitudes. This chapter explores the history of attempts to strike an acceptable balance between descriptive and prescriptive approaches to usage in select twentieth-century and twenty-first-century monolingual general-purpose English dictionaries, chiefly those of American Heritage, Merriam-Webster, and Oxford University Press.