Dictionaries of the national language of a country are an essential and quite frequently controversial part of social life and learning. This is an account of how such dictionaries are made, how they are used, and the issues and problems that face their writers and editors. It is wide-ranging, scholarly, yet readable in its approach, addressing the linguistic problems in areas such as distinguishing meanings, writing definition, and providing synonyms.

This book looks at how English words have been recorded, ordered, dissected, and displayed in dictionaries in Great Britain and the USA from the seventeenth century to the present. In the process it offers a complete introduction to how dictionaries are made. It considers the aims of their authors, the methods of their compilation, and the concepts and beliefs that lie behind them.

Henri Bejoint compares the descriptive approach of English lexicography with its more prescriptive American
counterpart, and contrasts both with the lexicography of France. Computers have transformed the...