When you imagine dictionary writers, or lexicographers, you may picture silver-haired, monocled professors scrutinizing words, smiling approvingly over some and tut-tutting over others, and finally stamping a large red "accepted" or "rejected" on each word.
But you would be wrong.
The popular conception that lexicographers only want "good words" in a dictionary couldn't be further from the truth. Dictionaries strive to be thorough and include even those words reviled by generations of English teachers, such as "ain't" or "y'all."
PHOTO: EPA
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) takes this practice to a whole new level, working to include all words used in English since 1150 (the end of the Old English period). The dictionary contains 301,100 words and 616,500 phrases. Most speakers only know about 20,000 words.
The 23-volume dictionary is over 20,000 pages long. The longest single entry is for the verb "set," which has over 430 different senses.
A small team of scholars cannot put a dictionary of this size together alone. Instead, volunteers from all over the world scour books and manuals, seeking out additional definitions and sending them to the OED for publication.
This year, the OED is promoting a word hunt to discover the origins of words with murky pasts. For example, when did people first start using "go bananas" to mean go wild? Who was the first person to call a bribe a "bung?" And since when could people start saying a slightly crazy person was "two sandwiches short of a picnic?"
The OED and the BBC are inviting people to seek out the origins of these words. So grab a book, pull up a chair and help improve English's most comprehensive dictionary.(Jason Cox, Staff Writer)
當你想像詞典編纂者（lexicographer）時，你腦海可能會浮現幾位滿髮花白、戴著單片眼鏡的教授，他們正在詳閱字句，對他人微笑表示認同，或不耐煩地發出嘖聲，最後在每個單字印上斗大的「接受」或「駁回」。
不過你可能是錯的。
一般人認為詞典編纂者只希望字典「字字珠璣」，這與事實出入頗大。字典希望能詳盡包括各世代英文老師都痛罵的那些辭彙，例如「ain't」或「y'all」。
牛津大字典將編字典帶入嶄新局面，廣納一一五○年（古英語時期結束）以來的所有詞彙用語。這部字典收錄了三十萬一千一百個單字與六十一萬六千五百個片語。英文使用者大多只認得兩萬個單字左右。
這部集結二十三冊的字典超過兩萬頁。解釋最長的單字是動詞「set」，共有四百三十多個不同意思。
學者小組無法獨立編撰這樣大部頭的字典，而是靠世界各地的自願者遍覽群書與手冊，找出其他定義，並寄給牛津大字典出版。
今年，牛津大字典推廣獵字活動，來發掘過去不為人知的字詞起源。例如，人們是何時開始用「go bananas」來指發瘋？是誰首先將賄賂稱為「bung」？人們何時開始將稍微瘋狂的人描述為「two sandwiches short of a picnic」？
牛津大字典與BBC邀請人們探究這些字詞的起源。所以，抓一本書，拉起一張椅子來讀，幫助最全面性的英文字典更上一層樓。 （翻譯：賴美君）
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