Word of the Day

: January 26, 2024

lexicographer

noun lek-suh-KAH-gruh-fer

What It Means

A lexicographer is an author or editor of a dictionary.

// Noah Webster believed that a lexicographer's work was to document a language as it is used, without any judgment or subjective influence.

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lexicographer in Context

"'Ma'am' ... comes from the French word for 'my lady' (ma dame), which in English turned into 'madam' and then 'ma'am' by the 1600s, according to Merriam-Webster. This pronunciation change happened at a time when American English was trying to differentiate itself from British English, explained Kelly Elizabeth Wright, experimental sociolinguist and lexicographer at Virginia Tech." — Janelle Davis, CNN, 12 Mar. 2023

Did You Know?

Today, we're looking at a word that is dear to our hearts: lexicographer. The ancient Greeks were some of the earliest makers of dictionaries; they used them mainly to catalog obsolete terms from their rich literary past. To create a word for writers of dictionaries, the Greeks sensibly attached the suffix -graphos, meaning "writer," to lexikon, meaning "dictionary," to form lexikographos, the direct ancestor of the English word lexicographer. Lexikon, which itself descends from Greek lexis (meaning "word" or "speech"), also gave us lexicon, which can mean either "dictionary" or "the vocabulary of a language, speaker, or subject."