The Dictionary of Difficult Words: An Interview with Jane Solomon
682GG. April 23, 2019. The Dictionary of Difficult Words.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language— writing, history, rules, and cool stuff. Today, I have an interview with Jane Solomon. You may remember my chat with Jane about a year ago when we talked about how dictionary.com had started defining emoji. Well, she’s back today to talk about her new children’s book, The Dictionary of Difficult Words.
There’s actually a long history of dictionaries that cover just difficult words. And we talked about one from 1604 called “A Table Alphabetical,” but Jane also sent me a follow up email with details about others, and I’ll share a little bit of that with you now.
There were a bunch of subject-specific dictionaries in the 17th century that covered topics like natural history, law, and medicine, but there was also a trend at this time for dictionaries of thieves’ cant—slang that criminals used because of the rise in rogue literature. People were reading about rogues, and they wanted to understand the language they were reading, so other people made dictionaries for them.
The first comprehensive English dictionary that went beyond difficult words and included regular words like “green” and “the” was Nathaniel Bailey’s “An Universal Etymological English Dictionary,” which was published in 1721 and according to Jane, was the most popular dictionary of it’s time, more popular even than Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of the English Language,” which is probably the most well-known of the early dictionaries today. That book was published in 1755, and set the standards and methodologies practiced by lexicographers today, but it was not the first dictionary to include ordinary words. And now, on to the interview.
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Mignon: Hi, Jane.
Jane: Hi.
Mignon: Thanks for joining me today.
Jane: Thanks for inviting me on your show again.
Mignon: Right. So you have a new book out called “The Dictionary of Difficult Words,” and it is one of the most adorable books I’ve ever seen.
Jane: Oh, thank you.
Mignon: It’s a really wonderful so. And what’s so fascinating is that it’s a dictionary just of difficult words. And a lot of people probably don’t know that there there’s sort of a history of those kind of dictionaries. So can you talk us through first before we talk about your book specifically? Can you talk about the history of this kind of dictionary? And maybe when we got the kind of dictionaries people think of today?
Jane: Sure, of course.
Jane: So originally, you know, when we think of a dictionary today, we think of a book that has any words you could possibly want to look up in it.
Jane: But as you mentioned, this is not how dictionaries always were. Originally, they were only lists of vocabulary items and difficult words for people to look up the words they didn’t know in them. So…and they would they would often be very subject specific. So you might have one about falconry. Or you might have one about law or medicine or gardening or something like that.
Jane: And when the first dictionaries were made, a lot of these word lists that were existing were compiled into these dictionaries. So sometimes you hear people talk about the history of dictionaries having a lot of plagiarism in it. It’s because of how these lists were taken in. And this is also why if you look at modern dictionaries, sometimes they have more words about falconry than you would expect because they’re based on this, you know, an early falconry vocabulary list for people who want to learn about falconry.
Mignon: I was going to ask you if the falconry thing was real or just something you made up.
Jane: Oh, yeah.
Jane: That that’s real. I don’t actually know the name of it. I’ll have to look into that. But that’s amazing. Yeah. I mean, and there I mean, it originally people just thought, “Oh, yeah. These are words that we don’t know and that’s the only thing we’re going to want to look up.” And then later on, people decided that, no, we want to actually define any word that you’re going to come across because you want to be able to be certain that you understand the meaning. And there’s so many nuances of meaning that a dictionary can really help with that. So you see that. You see that in dictionaries, you know, post Samuel Johnson. He definitely had a lot of more of the simple terms in them. I mean, if you look at Cawdray with “A Table Alphabetical,” which is what year that is, but that that’s from the 1600s. And the purpose of that dictionary is it’s dedicated to ladies and other unskilled persons. And it’s so you can understand the language that sophisticated people bring back to English from other languages when they go and travel abroad, or the difficult words that they learn when they’re when they’re studying. So so dictionaries are have, you know, historically very much been about these hard words.
Mignon: So there’s a long history of difficult words. And then did those early dictionaries, did they have definitions and pronunciation guides in them?
Jane: So I actually was looking at some earlier dictionaries in terms of pronunciation, because in an earlier version of this project, we weren’t going to have pronunciations. And I was wondering, oh, is that is that going to be difficult for the kids? Is there is there any precedent in that? And actually, earlier dictionaries didn’t always have pronunciations. That’s something that is always included in modern dictionaries. But it was not as included in some of these earlier dictionaries. I think Samuel Johnson’s dictionary doesn’t have pronunciations.
Mignon: Yeah, I was really glad you had them as I was looking through it. I mean, it’s all difficult words. So a lot of them I wasn’t sure how to pronounce or it was helpful to have the pronunciation guide.
Jane: Oh, yeah. I mean, especially this is a dictionary that is a little bit different than other dictionaries because it’s meant to be read aloud.
Mignon: Mm hmm.
Jane: So in that case, it’s actually really important to be able to to have the pronunciations right there, especially if you’re if you are an adult reading this to a child and the child asks you how to pronounce the word. It’s right there. So you don’t have to you don’t have to go and look for it. At the same time, I think this dictionary is very much a jumping off point for discovery. You know, there’s only so much you can include in 112 pages. For each each word that I have in there, I only include one definition. I only feature one definition. So if people get very excited about a word, they can go look it up in a bunch of other dictionaries and see what else they can learn about it.
Mignon: So what inspired you to do this project? Were you fascinated with these early difficult word dictionaries or did you have a list of favorite words you were just itching to put into a book? How did it how did it come about?
Jane: This project started in a very surprising way to me. I wasn’t someone who ever thought “I want to write a book.” I wasn’t someone who ever thought “I want to write a children’s book.” But one day, it was last February, I got contacted out of the blue by the publisher, and they had the idea for the title, and they knew they needed a lexicographer to write it. So they contacted me and asked me if I was willing to do it. And I was. I was actually very familiar with the publisher. So it’s it’s being published by Quarto Kids, and it’s under the imprint Frances Lincoln Children’s Books. And I actually knew this exact imprint because I have a friend who is a children’s author and illustrator who has written award-winning children’s book with the same team. So I responded right away very enthusiastically. “Yes, I would love to do this.” And within the week we had a call. And originally the project was, I think that the publisher and the editor, they definitely knew they wanted it to be a dictionary of difficult words, but they didn’t know how difficult the word should be because in the first call, the publisher, her name is Rachel Williams. She said that when she was younger, she was in a spelling bee, and she got the word “photosynthesis.” Correct. And she felt so good about it. And she would spell the word for everyone, define it for everyone around her. And so it’s the idea of that passion about language that you can develop really young and and the pride you feel when you know a word and how much delight you got as a as a young person talking about the word with everyone around you. So the book, it was sort of to capture that kind of spirit.
Mignon: That’s great. And so they did a fantastic job with the book. It is wonderful. We’re going to take a quick commercial break. And when we come back, we’ll find out whether “photosynthesis” is in the book. And we’ll talk about some other words in the book, too.
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Mignon: OK, we’re back. So you have to tell me, is “photosynthesis” in the book?
Jane: So actually, “photosynthesis” did not make it in the book. So when when Rachel mentioned the word photosynthesis, I replied, “OK, that is a really great word. What if we went much harder for this?” And there are definitely some words that are like “photosynthesis” in the book. We have “bioluminescent,” which is another sort of science word that’s very fun and visual. But yeah, photosynth… is that there are just so many good letter, good words that start with the letter P. So it didn’t make it in,.
Jane: Right! Because you want a balanced by the number of words per letter too, right?.
Jane: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So you know, I heard the word “photosynthesis” and I said “Let’s make it harder. What about something like “moonbow,” which is a rainbow that appears at night from the refracted light of the moon.” And they really loved that word. My editor, Katie, and the publisher, Rachel were very excited about that word. And they were just like, they want me to run with it. So to start the book, I made a word list. And as I was making the word list, I realized that I really wanted to do three levels of words for the book because I was writing..it’s a children’s book, but I wanted it to be entertaining for adults as well. So the three levels are really obscure words that you would only find in a book, an old book, and you wouldn’t hardly ever encounter in your everyday life unless you’re talking to a lexicographer.
Mignon: Like, what kind of word would that be?
Jane: Well, the first word in the book is abecedarian, which is someone who is learning the alphabet.
Mignon: Oh, like ABC-darian?
Jane: Yeah. Yeah.
Mignon: Oh, neat.
Jane: So that that’s in that really, really difficult word. And you wouldn’t likely encounter it unless you were in a conversation with someone who’s very into rare words. Then there’s a second level, like a mid-level. And those are words that adults would be familiar with, and they would probably know how to use them, but they would have trouble defining it to a 7 year old.
Mignon: Mm hmm. And what’s an example of one of those?
Jane: Oh, an example of one of those is maybe “anathema” if we’re sticking with the A section.
Mignon: Mm hmm.
Jane: So many adults will know this word. They’ll even be able to use it in a sentence. But when it comes to like a child asking, “OK, can you please break this down? What does it mean?” They might have trouble with that. And then the third level words was words that adults would definitely know and would boost their ego and make them feel good about themselves.
Mignon: What’s an example of that?
Jane: In the A section, “arid,” for sure.
Mignon: Mm hmm.
Jane: “Arachnophobia” probably.
Mignon: Right! And “arid,” that’s one where you sort of have pulled it out and there’s a full page beautiful illustration that goes more in-depth into the word, right?
Jane: Yeah. So all the illustrations in the book are by Louise Lockhart, who is online as “the printed peanut.” And she is…she’s amazing. She does these cut-out style illustrations with bold colors and lots of different textures. And I wrote the section B first because I happen to have a lot of B words. And I just felt like not starting with A because A can be really daunting. And I got back her illustrations, and I was blown away because when you’re working on it as a Google Doc, you never really know how it’s going to turn out. As I was working on it, I was like this. I think it’s OK. I think it’s good, but I don’t know. And then when I got the illustrations back, I thought, OK, more people than my mom are going to want to buy this.
Mignon: Yeah, I think they will. And there’s a picture of you. It’s under, is it lexicographer?
Jane: Oh, yeah, for the word lexicographer. There’s a picture of me. And I did not I did not directly ask for this. It was a shock when when I got that. So I had suggested that they get for that illustration. They draw a lexicographer is like, “Make it a woman!” Yeah, that was my only instruction there. You know, I didn’t give that much instruction on the illustrations at all. There are few that I sent some reference images. One of my favorite illustrations in the book is for the word ‘hurdy-gurdy,” which is the stringed instrument with the crank. And in my in my research, I found that it was really popular in the 18th century French court. So I started looking up 18th century French paintings of people playing hurdy-gurdy. And I sent a few along to our illustrator. And then she came up with something that is so beautiful. It’s bright yellow, pink, and orange. People in a ballroom and one person playing a hurdy-gurdy. So it’s really imaginative and beautiful. If I had dreamed up with the illustrations, would have looked like I would never have come up with that. You know, I write definitions. I’m not an illustrator, so I am in awe of Louise’s work.
Mignon: I could see it making a great gift. I think a kid would be excited when they saw it because it’s so cute and colorful. You said something about kids age 7. What? What age range are you? Is this book designed for? Who were you imagining as your reader?
Jane: So when I was originally working on the book, it was the idea was 7 plus. So anyone over 7 should be able to read this book. I think in the actual book it might say 8 through 12. But the idea is that 7-year-olds, are your average 7-year-old, would come to this book not knowing most of the head words. Most of the words that are in the book. They might know a couple of them. If they’re very if they’ve if they’re really, really into one particular topic, like if they love music, they might know some of these words. If they have like some other nonfiction book that goes into all the musical instruments of the world, they might know some of these words, or if they’re really into vehicles, they might know some of these words. But for the most part, most of these words are going to be new to a 7-year-old. And then as I was writing it, I thought all the words in the definitions need to be easy for a 7-year-old to understand. So so the words are hard, but the definitions contain much easier words. And that’s something in…you see in children’s dictionaries and you see in learner’s dictionaries. It’s called the “defining vocabulary.” And the idea is that you stick within a very small vocabulary for your defining just to make it as clear and easy to understand as possible. Making dictionaries in general is an exercise in constraint. And this was one of my constraints. I gave myself other constraints too. Like I wanted every single definition to sound okay out loud, which is not something I think about when I work on definitions for dictionary dot com at all.
Mignon: Yeah, yeah. I can. I can imagine a child reading it out loud to maybe, you know, maybe a 12-year-old reading it to their 7-year-old younger brother or sister maybe?
Jane: Yeah. I mean, I hope that that will happen. I can imagine. You know, I have a, I have a nephew. He is 4 right now. And I see him get really, really excited about domain specific vocabulary. He’s very into trucks. He knows all these…like when he was 3, he knew what a cement mixer was, which is something that I don’t know when I learned that word. I wasn’t 3 when I learned the word “cement mixer.” I didn’t have interest in different kinds of trucks. But the idea that kids can get really, really excited about really specific words. And for the kids who are not into trucks, a book where the words are the topic is a very exciting thing. I would have been really excited about a book like this as a child.
Mignon: Were there any sections you had trouble with, like getting enough words to fill it up, or there were so many you had trouble paring it down? Or were there words that you wanted to include but decided not to for some reason?
Jane: I mentioned constraints before. One of the constraints is that I wanted to have most of the words in each section be really is visual. So some words didn’t make the cut because they were a little bit hard to illustrate, and I wanted to make it so there’d only be one or two that wouldn’t be illustratable per section. In terms of the most difficult section to write I would say X is the hardest letter of the alphabet to find words. There just are not a lot of words that start with X, and there there are some really fun words start with X, but a lot of them use the same prefix. So you have “xylo,” which means wood. And so there were a lot of really good words that started with X that use “xylo,” but I didn’t want to include that many of them. Like “xiph” is “fish,” no, sorry, “xiph” is “sword,” so I have “xiph” and “xiphoid.” So it was really hard to find words that began with X and in fact, yeah, it was definitely harder to do X. And I wrote to my editor and I was like, “If you want a second book, maybe we should have have half as many X words as the other words, because it’s going to be hard to come up with another 15 words that are interesting that fit together in this way, that are right for this audience that start with X. And I mean, when that was…I did write it in order, so I wrote B first, but then I went back to A. So X was near the end, and it was so much harder than the other ones. I actually, as I was working…I did the word list before I started writing the book because I wanted to make sure it was balanced. But when I came to the X’s, I thought, there are very few words here. I’m going to have to come back and beef this out. And and I actually read through entire dictionary sections of X to find all the words I wanted to feature in there.
Mignon: Wow. So you’re wishing maybe take three away from X and add them to P because there are so many good ones there or something like that.
Jane: Oh, yeah. There are so many good words that start with P that I couldn’t even include in here. And you know…there’s a lot of letters that have a lot of great words. T has a lot of great words, S has a lot of great words. I had to…I had so many that I had to not use from there that that those were the…those are generally really big letters of the alphabet. So I was, I was, I definitely had to pare down. And it was a question of what’s what’s nice and visual, what’s the right level? And that’s that’s how we came up with the words that are in the book.
Mignon: Finally, it’s so funny because an average person, you know, if we think about letters at all, we might think, oh, this is a good one in Scrabble or, you know, on Jeopardy, someone always picks the vowel E first or something like that. But for a lexicographer, it’s an entirely different way it seems like of thinking about letters. Like there’s a lot of good words that start with T or, you have to work on the P.S. this month or something like that.
Jane: There are a lot of great words that start with the letter D. That was a really fun one to write. The letters that are plentiful in words that are at the level that I wanted them to be at, and that are visual enough for this audience and are age appropriate. That’s, that was the challenge. F was another one I have…that was a fun one to write. G is…there are a ton of good letters or words at G, but yeah, X not as many. Z was actually a breeze compared S. And there aren’t that many words that start with Z in English. That’s a relatively small section of the dictionary. But I was like “Wow, there are so many more Z-words that are great for this book than I thought there would be.
Mignon: It’s good to end on a high note.
Jane: Yeah.
Mignon: Well again, it’s called The Dictionary of Difficult Words by Jane Solomon, and you can get it wherever fine books are sold, as I always like to say. I don’t know, I think it’ll be available, I’m sure as an e-book, but I think this is when you, kind of, would want an in print. You’d want you’d want to hold it, you want to turn the pages and look at it, I think.
Jane: Yeah, well, actually I think one of the things that you lose in a digital dictionary is being able to flip through the pages and just randomly find a word.
Mignon: Mm hmm.
Jane: It’s much easier to do if you’re holding a printed out document, an actual book. And actually at the at the beginning of the book, I have a little I guess you could call it a poem or instructions. It’s a numbered list on how to read this book, because I, as I was writing it, I thought, you know what, a lot of 7-year-olds probably have only used digital versions of dictionaries.
Mignon: Yeah.
Jane: And this is gonna be a completely foreign object to them. So I tried to infuse like the fun and serendipity, serendipity of like reading a dictionary into that list. So one of the, one of the numbered items is you can open up to a random page, close your eyes, put your finger down, and then read what you’re pointing at.
Mignon: Mm hmm.
Jane: So that’s that’s a way that you could read the book. You could also read it, you could read it backwards from the letter Z to A. You could just open up to any page and then quiz anyone in the room about the definition of a word. Another way to read this book is that you mentioned earlier that for each letter there’s a certain featured word, and that word, there’s a little bit of extra information and a giant full page beautiful illustration that goes with that word. So you could…it actually works as an alphabet book within a dictionary. So you could just go through and read the featured definitions and the…along with a feature. Illustrations there are 26 of those, so that’s a little bit more manageable than reading 400 words.
Mignon: Right. So A is for area B is for…
Jane: Bioluminescence. C is for “cryptozoology.” D is for “doppelganger.” What is E? “estival” F is “funambulist.” So you can go through and read all of those through like an ABC book.
Mignon: Fabulous. F is for “fabulous.”.
Jane: Yeah. Thank you.
Jane: “Fabulous” didn’t make it in the book.
Mignon: No, it’s too easy.
Mignon: Well, thank you so much for being here with me today. You’ve made a wonderful book, and I think people are really going to love it. Again it’s called The Dictionary of Difficult Words.
Jane: Thank you so much for taking an interest in my book. I am so excited to talk to you about it and to share it with people. It is, it is so beautiful. The illustrations are so, so vivid and amazing. That actually one more thing is that when we were talking about the illustration style, the publisher and the editor had this vision of doing a folk art illustration style. And I really liked that idea. But I also said I think it needs to not, I think it needs to be very bright colors. It can’t feel like a musty book on a shelf. It should be, It should be this living thing. So…
Mignon: Yeah, I would say it feels kind of modern.
Yeah. I think the illustrations are very editorial, for sure. And in terms of being modern, as I was working on it, I was thinking about what are, what are words or language that might feel really outdated in, you know, in 15 to 20 years and 5 years even. So, I said this is a project of constraints. I didn’t allow myself to use the word “crazy” in this. That’s a word that I’ve been personally avoiding. I grew up saying it all the time, but I think that it can be ablest, and I don’t want to harm anyone. So I don’t have “crazy” in here. I don’t have the word “stupid” in this book.
Mignon: And you use the singular “they,” right?
Jane: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I actually have a usage note at the end about how this book uses singular “they” throughout. I didn’t want to gender anything that didn’t need to be gendered. So even for a definition like “avuncular,” which means “acting like an uncle,” I didn’t use any gendered pronouns because you might be an uncle and not use, you know, the pronoun “he.”.
Mignon: Mm hmm.
Jane: And that is, you know, I would not want someone who is in that situation and is an uncle and uses the pronoun “they” to be reading this to to a child and not see themselves in it.
Mignon: So you didn’t use “crazy.” You use the singular “they.” What are the other constraints along that line, those lines that you used?
Jane: Oh, yeah. I didn’t use “stupid.” I didn’t use “idiot.” I tried to use words that would not, I mean, “crazy” is a word that really I didn’t…I had no problem with it growing up. It was used all the time. But lately I’ve been hearing how it can be really harmful to use that word. So I’ve been trying to challenge myself, to use other words whenever I in a situation where I might have used that term, and this is in my speech as a well, it’s not just in my writing. So that was another thing I did.
Mignon: It’s a tiny amount of effort to avoid potentially hurting people.
Jane: Yeah. Yeah. It’s so interesting that…one of the words sorry, I know this interview… One of the words that was really interesting as I was researching this book is the word “cockalorum.”
Jane: And as I looked it up in different dictionaries, I define it as…a cockalorum is someone who thinks that they are more important than they actually are. As I was looking it up in different dictionaries, even modern some modern dictionaries said that a cockalorum was a self-important man. And I was wondering when the definitions were actually written and, you know, or when when this word was actually popular, would it have been that women weren’t even thought of as people who could be self-important? Is that why “self-important man” was there instead of “self-important person”? So that’s something it was really interesting. And, you know, my, my definition is not gendered. It doesn’t need to be gendered.
Mignon: What’s the etymology?
Jane: So the etymology is actually gendered. It’s from the word “cock,” which is a male chicken or rooster. But just because the etymology is gendered doesn’t mean that the modern sense of the word, that I am going to be teaching to children needs to be gendered. Words change. And just because their etymology has its roots in one place doesn’t mean that’s where the meaning goes as the word evolves. An example of this is “decimate,” right? This is a classic example of a word that originally meant killing 1 in 10 soldiers, basically to teach a lesson to an army.
Jane: And now it just means to destroy generally. So some people get very upset when you use “decimate” in this modern sense because they say, “No, that’s not what it originally meant.” But, you know, they don’t know the etymology of every single word that they use. So it’s only these, these few that they happen to know that they decide to care about and to be sticklers on. A word like “nice,” originally, it meant “ignorant” in English. And these people probably don’t know that and use the word “nice” in the modern way all the time. And it’s completely OK for them to do that. So I think when you when you’re a lexicographer, you just you just let things go. You don’t judge when people use different senses of the word. And you, you would never, you would never be someone who only thinks the true meaning is where it’s originated from etymologically. That, that is, that would make you…it would be very hard to speak that way because you’d have to look up every single word you said.
Mignon: Well, then there’d be people who’d be using dictionaries more.
Jane: Oh, yeah. Buy more dictionaries!
Mignon: It is the dictionary sales project.
Jane: Yeah. That’s… Okay, I’m in support of that then. And they’re actually aren’t etymologies is in my dictionary, but you should buy it anyway. Please buy it for everyone you know. Buy it for…I think you should even buy it for your enemies who you think should learn all these words. You can send it to them anonymously and that is totally fine.
Mignon: Absolutely. The more the merrier. Buy as many copies as you can. Oh, wonderful. Thank you again so much for being here with me today. I really appreciate it.
I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. You can find a transcript of this interview and a picture of Jane’s book at QuickAndDirtyTips.com. That’s all. Thanks for listening.