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When is a book not a book? When there are no chapters, it needs special editors and researchers, isn't read from cover to cover, and its usefulness varies with size. In this presentation of the O'Reilly Tools For Change conference, Erin McKean, Chief Consulting Editor for American Dictionaries at Oxford University Press, explains why despite their appearance, dictionaries don't act like books and don't meet most of our expectations for books.
Just like an emu doesn't feel as much like a bird as a robin does, a dictionary doesn't feel as much like a book as Catcher in the Rye does. While the metaphor of a book was a useful way to convey information for the last several hundred years, a dictionary functions much more like a search engine. Even this isn't the ideal form for dictionary information - the ultimate dictionary would be embedded in the world around us, available in whatever context it is needed.
Erin McKean likes to call herself a Dictionary Evangelist. She is Chief Consulting Editor, American Dictionaries for Oxford University Press, and the editor of VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly. She was the editor in chief of the The New Oxford American Dictionary, and is the author of Weird and Wonderful Words, More Weird and Wonderful Words, Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, and That's Amore (also about words). Previously she was the editorial manager for the Thorndike-Barnhart Dictionaries at ScottForesman, a Pearson company. She has served on the board of the Dictionary Society of North America and on the editorial board for its journal, Dictionaries, as well as on the editorial board for the journal of the American Dialect Society, American Speech. She also serves on the advisory boards of the Wikimedia Foundation and XRefer. She lives in Chicago, rants about dresses on her blog (A Dress A Day), and she's actually really bad at Scrabble (but surprisingly good at roller-skating).
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