On Wednesday November 17th, Emily Brewster, Senior Editor and Editorial Ambassador for Merriam Webster, presented the 11th Freeman lecture: The Dictionary, the Definer, and How the Internet Has Changed Them Both. A video recording of the talk is now available, as is a written version. An abstract is below.

The Freeman lecture, established in 2004, brings to campus a linguist whose work is of interest to a population outside of linguistics and academia.  The Freeman lectures honor department founder Donald C. Freeman and his wife Margaret H. Freeman and their contributions to Linguistics at the UMass Amherst. A list of previous speakers can be found here: https://www.umass.edu/linguistics/freeman-lecture.

The Dictionary, the Definer, and How the Internet Has Changed Them Both 

We’ll start with an exploration of what many readers expect of the dictionary and how that contrasts with what the aims of a dictionary’s creators are. To what degree is the dictionary’s perceived role as arbiter, as settler of arguments and justifier of claims, accurate? From there we’ll go on to look at the work of the lexicographer as practiced at Merriam-Webster: what are the criteria a word must meet to qualify for entry in a dictionary? What must the lexicographer consider in defining a word? The third part of the talk will address the impact of the Internet on both the dictionary’s role and on the lexicographer’s work.