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7.1 Dictionary aims
In the Preface to W3, the editor, Philip Gove, wrote of the aims of the diction- ary as follows:
G. and C. Merriam Company now offer Webster’s Third New International Dictionary to the English-speaking world as a prime linguistic aid to inter- preting the culture and civilization of today, as the first edition served the America of 1828.
This edition has been prepared with a constant regard for the needs of the high school and college student, the technician, and the periodical reader, as well as of the scholar and professional . . . The dictionary more than ever is the indispensable instrument of understanding and progress.
This new Merriam–Webster unabridged is the record of this language [Eng- lish] as it is written and spoken. It is offered with confidence that it will supply in full measure that information on the general language which is required for accurate, clear, and comprehensive understanding of the vocabulary of today’s society.
Gove identifies the groups of users whose needs have especially been consid- ered in the course of compiling the dictionary, and he specifies what those needs are: interpreting today’s culture and civilisation, understanding the

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vocabulary of today’s society. ‘Interpreting’ and ‘understanding’ (hard words) were the aims of Robert Cawdrey’s first monolingual dictionary in 1604 (see Chapter 4). But W3 has an aim that Cawdrey did not have, and it in large part explains the difference between them: to be the ‘record’ of the language. What it is exactly that dictionaries are recording has been touched on briefly in Chap- ter 3, and it will be examined in more detail in Chapters 8 to 10.
All dictionaries make a selection from the one to two million words of cur- rent English. Gove acknowledges this in respect of the 450,000 words chosen for W3. So, when a dictionary claims to provide ‘the most comprehensive coverage of current English’ (NODE), or to be ‘the world’s most comprehen- sive dictionary’ (CED4), we must interpret those statements as meaning ‘of large content or scope; wide-ranging’ rather than ‘including or dealing with all or nearly all elements or aspects of something’ (definitions from NODE). All dictionaries aim for comprehensiveness in the ‘wide-ranging’ sense, for, as Samuel Johnson noted in his Plan, ‘it is rather to be wished that many readers should find more than they expect, than that one should miss what he might hope to find’. NODE claims to have ‘targeted previously neglected fields as diverse as computing, complementary medicine, antique collecting, and winter sports’ and to have undertaken ‘a detailed and comprehensive survey of plants and animals throughout the world, resulting in the inclusion of hundreds of entries not in any other one-volume dictionary’ (Preface). CED4’s claim to compre- hensiveness rests on its coverage of ‘the whole spectrum of general language from formal and archaic to slang and informal expressions’, its inclusion of ‘the language of an enormous range of general subjects, from art to television, and specialist subjects, from aeronautics to zoology’, as well as ‘varieties of English from all over Britain and around the world’ (Foreword). Comprehensiveness ranges, then, along the dimensions of formality, topic, and dialect.
Chambers, which also claims to have ‘enjoyed long acceptance as the most comprehensive single-volume dictionary of the English language’ (dust jacket), notes that dictionaries ‘must be faithful recorders of the language’ (Preface). In fulfilling this obligation, they need to reflect changes in society and their effects on the vocabulary, and this, in turn influences the selection of the words to include. However, Chambers is mindful that, as well as being ‘of unrivalled value to . . . students, scholars, writers, journalists, librarians and publishers’ and ‘re- plete with words of technical importance to scientists, lawyers, accountants and people in business’, it is also ‘the treasure chest for all word-game players and word lovers’ (dust jacket). For this reason, Chambers includes ‘unusual and archaic words’ for such users. Chambers also numbers among its users those who ‘read it simply for pleasure’ (Preface). The dictionary has an extensive range of users and their needs to satisfy.
And they, like all dictionary users, need to be able to find their way around the dictionary and access efficiently the information that they are seeking. Dictionaries aim to be ‘accessible’. NODE claims ‘maximum accessibility – with a revolutionary new entry style’ (dust jacket). CED4 claims that ‘in 1979 Collins English Dictionary revolutionised the way English dictionaries were

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presented . . . by the simple but, at that time, radical approach of considering the user’s needs’ (Foreword). Chambers claims to be ‘the most accessible of reference books’ (dust jacket). Accessibility is about how a user gets at the particular piece of information about the word or phrase that they are consult- ing the dictionary for. In a reference work of the scale and density of a desk size or concise dictionary, this is clearly an important issue, since users are not usually prepared to peruse a considerable amount of material in order to locate the sought-for nugget of enlightenment. We discuss below the factors that con- tribute to accessibility; here, we merely note that it is an aim of dictionaries to be accessible.
We can conclude that dictionaries have two fundamental aims: coverage, and accessibility. Coverage includes the aim to be ‘comprehensive’, representing an up-to-date and wide-ranging selection of vocabulary, and the aim to be a ‘faith- ful record’ of the lexical resources of the language. Both aims can be viewed as user-oriented: ensuring that what a user wants to know is made available, and enabling the user to get at it by the most straightforward means. But do we know what users consult their dictionaries for?
7.2 Dictionary uses
What kind of reliable evidence is there about what users look up in a dictionary? What methodologies are there for finding out? Most of the surveys that have been done (referenced in Béjoint 2000: 141) have involved the use of a ques- tionnaire, in which users (mainly students) report on their own dictionary use. Self-reporting does not always produce the most reliable data; besides a tend- ency to overstate or underplay, according to question asked and the personality of the respondent, questions such as ‘How often do you consult a dictionary?’ are notoriously difficult to gauge accurately. Nevertheless, results from ques- tionnaires on the use of native speaker dictionaries all agree that the top two reasons for consulting a dictionary are:
1 to discover the meaning of a word
2 to check the spelling of a word.
The first of these may involve either looking up a word that is unknown and whose meaning cannot be deduced from the context in which it has been met (a ‘hard’ word), or checking the meaning of a word about which the user may be confused (perhaps, for example, aggravate).
A questionnaire administered to French students of English on their use of monolingual English dictionaries (including learners’ dictionaries) revealed that looking up the meaning of words was also the top use for this group of users (Béjoint 1981). Checking spelling came joint fourth with checking pronuncia- tion. Reflecting their use of dictionaries for writing tasks, including translation (see 6.5 below), the second and third most frequent occasions of lookup for these students were: to check the syntactic patterns that a word could enter; and

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to discover a synonym for a word. What Béjoint also discovered was that most of the respondents had not read the front matter of their dictionary, in particular the guide to using the dictionary, and so were unaware of the wealth of infor- mation that the dictionary contained.
Despite a hundred or more studies of dictionary use, we are still far from understanding either the range of uses for which dictionaries are consulted or the strategies that are used to access dictionary information (Hartmann 2001). Most of the studies have focused on students, and many of them on students engaged in tasks associated with foreign language learning – translation, writing in the foreign language, and so on. And most of them have used a questionnaire as the study instrument, which does not necessarily produce an authentic pic- ture of dictionary use, as expressed by Hatherall (1984: 184):
Are subjects saying here what they do, or what they think they do, or what they think they ought to do, or indeed a mixture of all three?
An alternative method of investigating dictionary use is the ‘protocol’ or diary, when a respondent is asked to record their lookup each time they use a diction- ary in the course of a specific task (e.g. Nuccorini 1992). Again, this involves self-reporting, but it requires recording procedures as they are being undertaken or immediately on completion, so the resulting data may well turn out both to be more authentic and to provide greater insight into the dictionary lookup process and the reasons for it. A method that does not involve self-reporting would be direct observation of subjects, which would only be possible in con- trolled circumstances (e.g. a classroom), and may itself influence the way in which subjects behave. It is not easy to get at either what triggers a dictionary consultation or exactly what happens when it occurs. A further question that deserves investigation is whether users access electronic dictionaries differently from print dictionaries (cf. Nesi 1999).
One dictionary that claims to have consulted its potential users and to have adjusted its content accordingly is the Encarta Concise English Dictionary (2001). Kathy Rooney, the Editor-in-Chief, states in her ‘Introduction’:
People like you said they wanted answers to the following questions. Am I spelling this word correctly? What does this word mean? Am I using the word correctly? How do I pronounce this word? Where does the word come from? We also established that you set great store by the ease with which you can understand the information in the dictionary, the clarity with which it is presented, and the speed with which you can navigate through long entries. In addition, we asked 41 professors of English from the UK, Australia, the United States, and Canada about the language prob- lems their students faced. This survey revealed surprisingly similar findings across the globe. All expressed concern that students increasingly have dif- ficulties with basic language skills – especially spelling and grammar.
(p. xi)

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On this basis, as well as that of personal experience and anecdote, we may conclude that users consult dictionaries for more than just ‘meaning’ and ‘spell- ing’, though for these primarily. Where a dictionary is consulted during word games, it is usually to verify whether a word exists or is a legitimate formation. We may consult a dictionary to determine the pronunciation of a, usually tech- nical, word that we have met only in print. Students of language may need to find out about word histories and origins, or about the range and contexts of meaning that a word may have. Or, as Chambers suggests, people may peruse a dictionary for pleasure, or for ‘edification’ (Hartmann 2001: 88). Occasions of lookup, or reference needs, are diverse and various: how do dictionaries aid the user to access the specific piece of information they are looking for?