Creating a Best-Seller

LOGOS Creating a Best-Seller

Adventures with a Dictionary*

Charles McGregor The commonest association with “best-seller” is “fi ction”. That has been so for centuries. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress – fi rst published in 1678 and in its twenty-fi fth edition by 1738; Defoe’sRobinson Cru- soe – issued in 1719 and in its seventh edition by 1726; Scott’s Waverley – out in 1814, its rapid sale of 12,000 considered remarkable (Leavis, pp. 331 and 333); Harry Potter now – J.K. Rowling’s Foundation Charles McGregor specialises in educational and in- was set up with income from Harry’s saga. These formational publishing. He has been a director of the are the iconic best-sellers of their times. Longman ELT division, now in Pearson Education But history titles have also been best-sellers. and so part of the media group Pearson, and editorial When the last volume of David Hume’s History director of Evans Brothers (Nigeria Publishers). As a of England appeared in 1762, he wrote: “Notwith- consultant, he has worked on World Bank education standing the variety of events and seasons to which projects in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, my writings had been exposed, they had still been and for the European Commission and the Malaysian making such advances that the copy money given Publishers Association, and he has directed a post- me by the booksellers much exceeded anything graduate course on publishing at the University of the formerly known in England. I was become not only Arts London. His current projects include a diction- independent but opulent” (Mumby, p. 170). There ary for Russian learners of English and a course on are modern analogues. the environment for intermediate and advanced learn- Dictionaries are the hidden best-sellers. Their ers of English. He is at present Visiting Professor at sales hardly register in general consciousness, apart the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies, perhaps from two. One is from the eighteenth cen- Lomonosov Moscow State University. tury: Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the Eng- lish Language, published in 1755. The other began E-mail: [email protected] in the nineteenth and fi nished in the twentieth: James Murray’s A New English Dictionary on His- torical Principles, known now as The Oxford English Dictionary or OED, whose fi nal volume appeared in 1928, more than a decade after Murray himself died. Both were meant more for native speakers than for foreign learners. Not that Johnson forgot the latter: “The chief glory of every people arises from its authours [sic] … I shall not think my employ- ment useless or ignoble, if by my assistance foreign nations … gain access to the propagators of knowl- edge, and understand the teachers of truth” (Pref- ace, 1755, see Greene, p. 327). But such fortunate foreigners were not his primary audience. DOI: 10.1163/095796511X560196

Two hundred years later many more of the be- availability in a highly structured computerized nighted were learning English. The leading pub- format has had a very deep impact upon the lishers of the day, and their authors, began to computational linguistics community. Scores of respond to this. The fi rst English dictionary for academic and commercial research laboratories foreign learners appeared in 1936 (A New Method have been able to use the dictionary database to English Dictionary by Michael West, from Long- carry out experiments with a view to overcoming man) and in 1948 Oxford University Press (OUP) the lexical acquisition bottleneck which plagues published a more substantial work based on re- every large-scale NLP project even today. The search in the 1930s at the Tokyo Institute for Re- LDOCE database, together with WordNet (…) search in English Teaching. Its principal author is probably the most frequently cited linguistic was A.S. Hornby; the fi rst (1948) edition was called database in computational linguistics research” A Learner’s Dictionary of Current English and this (Thierry Fontenelle, ed. A.P. Cowie, pp. 412, dominated the ELT (or English-language teach- 434 and 435). ing) market for the next 30 years although better known under the title of its second edition (1963), Not a landmark like Johnson’s dictionary or the The Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current Eng- OED – a smaller thing. But large for me: my name lish or ALD. The current edition of the ALD (the appears fi rst under “Publishing administration” in seventh) states on its cover: “This is the world’s LDOCE 1’s cast-list. As the fi rst manager of the bestselling advanced learner’s dictionary, recom- ELT division’s dictionary department, I was present mended by learners of English and their teachers, at LDOCE 1’s (effective) conception and I cared and used by 30 million people”. for it during most of its antenatal period. What fol- Strong claims, but then for its fi rst 30 years it had lows is an account of that experience. no competitor. In 1978 one appeared: the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English or LDOCE. Johnson’s Dictionary as Precursor The newcomer’s sales grew rapidly. The 1988 An- LDOCE was not Longman’s fi rst dictionary. Among nual Report of Pearson plc, Longman’s owner, in- the seven booksellers who fi nanced Johnson’s Dic- troduced a second edition of LDOCE (LDOCE 2) tionary were two named Thomas Longman. Tho- by claiming that LDOCE 1 was Longman’s most mas the elder had founded the house of Longman successful title since the fi rm’s foundation in 1724; in 1724 and Thomas the younger succeeded his un- Asa Briggs in his history of Longman explained cle in 1755 – two months after the Dictionary was that “since its fi rst publication … LDOCE( ) had published. When LDOCE 1 was being prepared in sold in huge numbers all over the world” (Briggs, the early 1970s, we in Longman wanted to project p. 495). Its popularity did not diminish. The 1995 an image of authority in dictionary-making so we Annual Report stated: “Key new (ELT) products stressed this historical link, and were delighted included a third edition of (LDOCE), the leading when a trade-press headline read “Longmans back dictionary of its kind, and probably the most im- in dictionaries”. But there was no real continuity. portant single investment made in this market by Longman published no equivalent dictionary in Longman.” LDOCE’s current edition is its fi f t h . the 19th century, although it did publish Roget’s LDOCE 1 was not only a commercial but also Thesaurus (in 1852). a critical success. The head of the general affairs Although OUP published the major work of unit in the Translation Centre for the Bodies of 19th century English lexicography, it was not the the European Union wrote recently: OED’s originator. In 1857 at a meeting of the Eng- lish Philological Society, Dean Trench presented (LDOCE 1) can be seen as a major milestone in two papers On Some Defi ciencies in Our English the history of English lexicography … (it) truly Dictionaries, which so impressed other members revolutionized the fi eld of foreign learner lexi- that the Society began to collect words not found cography and of linguistics, as well as the fi eld in current dictionaries. Broadening its ambitions, of natural language processing (NLP) … (its) it planned a new and comprehensive dictionary