Since the introduction of Murray’s innovative methods and the publication of the OED, very little has changed in dictionary-making. Generations of twentieth-century lexicographers saw no need to change a method that had successfully created the greatest English dictionary that had ever been written. Murray had predicted as much in 1900 when he gave the Romanes Lecture at Oxford:

It is never possible to forecast the needs and notions of those who shall come after us; but with our present knowledge it is not easy to conceive what new feature can now be added to English Lexicography in the Oxford Dictionary, permeated as it is through and through with the scientific method of the century. Lexicography has for the present reached its supreme development.

Murray was right: lexicography had reached its supreme development for the turn of the twentieth century. We have been following his methods ever since. Apart from using large collections of electronic texts (corpora) to gauge word frequency and usage, our current lexicographic methods are basically the same as those established 150 years ago.

When I first started to work in Oxford as an editor on the OED, at the start of the twenty-first century, I was surprised that we still received hundreds of quotations each month from ‘readers’ around the world who sent in 4 x 6-inch slips of paper showing the use of a word in their local sources. This was the readers’ system founded by Murray in 1879 and epitomised by the work of Dr Minor, as Simon Winchester so compellingly described it in The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words (1998). Apart from the use of computers, the editing process I followed was exactly the same as that begun by Murray: each lexicographer was given a box of slips corresponding to our respective portion of the alphabet – for me, these were all the words that entered English from outside Europe – and we worked through slip by slip, word by word, striving to piece together fragments of an incomplete historical record, until we had crafted an entry and presented a logical chain of semantic development in much the same way that Murray and his editors had.

The dictionaries we know and love and have used since childhood are the result of this succession of lexicographic innovations, developed over four centuries. It is these same dictionaries that many critics are now declaring to be ‘dead’. From the New York Times to the Sydney Morning Herald,the death knell is being sounded for the dictionary. The Deputy Editor of the Indian national newspaper, The Hindu, recently challenged his readers: ‘My dictionary-buying days are way behind me. I no longer need one. Why just me? When was the last time you actually reached out for one?’ And recently John Walsh, in the Independent of London, summed it up thus: ‘Bluntly put, dictionaries are in trouble, and have been for years.’

Actually, what these critics are really saying is that the print dictionary is dead. As Doug McIntyre put it in the LA Times a few months ago, ‘Who needs a dictionary when we have spell check? Who needs a library when we have Google?’ They are predicting that dictionaries are going in the same direction as vinyl records, cassette tapes, and camera film – endangered species only to be resuscitated in retro-revivals. And to a certain extent print sales do indicate this. Every year, print sales slightly decrease except in a couple of markets: primary schools and English Language Teaching.

But what these doomsayers do not perhaps realise is that dictionaries and word datasets are used in algorithms that power the backend of the Internet and hundreds of applications and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces, which are sets of rules and coding that software programs use to communicate with one another). All these rely on the old-fashioned products of lexicography. The Internet to which they are turning would not be the same without the supposedly defunct dictionary.

This means that in some cases dictionaries are becoming less visible as distinct entities, and have almost ‘dissolved’ to form algorithms and applications that enrich online and digital content, and can be characterised as ‘search’, word auto-complete, voice recognition, handwriting recognition, spell check, automatic summarisation, X-ray tools, related-link functions, real-time translation and subtitling. Then there are those transparent applications such as dictionary websites, dictionary apps, word games, crossword websites, and search functions (word, phrase, wild card features) on both the web and in eBooks. All these applications depend on electronic versions of print dictionaries and wordlists, even though they are often referred to as ‘digital dictionaries’, as though that were somehow a new entity in both content and form.

Free online dictionary websites are being heralded as the next great innovation, maybe even the next revolution. None of them has yet proven to be so, for they are mostly print dictionaries – and often old print dictionaries – online. These applications therefore suffer from a lack of up-to-date, quality dictionary content. Most are either compiled by the public without any curation or editing, or are electronic versions of out-of-copyright print dictionaries which were simply scanned and cleaned up, or sent to India and typed up. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and scanned versions of out-of-print dictionaries are what form the core of existing dictionary sites such as CIDE (Collaborative International Dictionary of English) or Wordnik, which use the 1913 Webster’s Dictionary and 1891 Century Dictionary,respectively.

Users of free online dictionaries are fooled if they think that an out-of-copyright dictionary wrapped in XML is a brand new, cutting-edge product. Basically, all they have is an out-of-print dictionary that is searchable, which has been supplemented with feeds from free online corpora or Twitter to make it look more contemporary. But there is no new lexicographic content. Hence, these sites are not the creation of lexicographers, but rather commercial web entrepreneurs for whom profit rather than scholarship is the bottom line. A typical online dictionary start-up is backed by wealthy venture capitalists and is supported by marketing managers who can tell you how to wrap an out-of-print dictionary in HTML and sell it online to millions of people with the claim that it is the next new thing in dictionaries. They certainly have the marketing; they have the potential of the technology; but they lack the quality content.

So another revolution in dictionary making has not yet happened, despite what the marketing men may say. But we are on the verge of one. The future of dictionaries is online, but the truly innovative online dictionary has yet to be born, and it will need to be, to borrow a phrase from the founders of the OED in 1857, ‘an entirely new dictionary; no patch upon old garments but a new garment throughout’. What will be needed to make this ‘new garment’?

Three essential ingredients will be needed that no online dictionary currently combines: editorial and lexicographic expertise; sophisticated technology; and contributions from the public.

Professional lexicographers will always be needed, doing the painstaking work of tracing etymologies, tracking new words, and writing their definitions, if we want more than digitised versions of out-of-copyright dictionaries. Language is dynamic and always changing in its use and meanings: all new and revised dictionaries need to describe the constant flux in language use and development. This means that it will be essential for professional lexicographers and quality dictionary presses to lead the way in the creation of the dictionaries of the future.

The employment of sophisticated technology will be essential. For example, a word could be described not just in words and image, but also in sound and video. A word’s use throughout history and in the present moment could be shown in more than mere written citations. Algorithms could analyse words over time and represent that analysis in different modes. A user would be able to choose a dictionary structure and a desired degree of detail, thereby accessing different layers of meaning in a way that is ‘smart’ and custom-made to their choices and interests. The smart dictionary could learn from what users do, and what information they look for, and adapt itself accordingly. In a wiki-fashion, the technology could also be designed to handle user-generated content, and allow editors – the lexicographers – to curate this content, ensuring its scholarly rigour, and integrate it into the dictionary database.

Indeed, collaboration and contributions from the public will be vital to this lexicographic revolution. Professional lexicographers will always need the help of readers and users far and near. We will create the innovative twenty-first century dictionary in collaboration, just as the OED and its national ‘spin-offs’ such as the Australian National Dictionary (AND) have always been created. James Murray used the Royal Mail to receive quotations from his readers. We can use technology, not only to harvest quotations but also to crowd-source all aspects of dictionary-making, thereby drawing on the interest, knowledge, and skill of people who care about a topic but do not necessarily want to devote their lives to it. The philosophy of crowd-sourcing depends essentially on the fact that an open call to a group of people will attract those who are most fit to perform the tasks. It is not so very far from Murray’s famous Appeal to the English-speaking and English-reading Public in Great Britain, America, and the Colonies in 1879, in which he invited people around the world to read local books and send in quotations. Two thousand men and women, many of them in Australia, immediately responded.

The Australian National Dictionary Centre, a collaborative centre of the Australian National University and Oxford University Press founded by Bill Ramson in 1988, has always led the way in dictionary writing, both in research and practice, being the place where Australia’s Oxford Dictionaries are written. In the coming year, readers of ABR will be invited to share in the crowd-sourcing activities of Australian Oxford dictionaries and walk into the future of dictionary writing with the lexicographers at that Centre. Through my regular columns for ABR, I will keep readers posted on the words we are working on and the techniques we will be experimenting with in order to produce the dictionary of tomorrow. Let’s see if we can create the next revolution in dictionary writing together.