Macmillans English Dictionary for the Advanced

Learner
Henk Verkuyl
UiLOTS Utrecht

10 april 2003

Ladies and Gentlemen, I must confess that I feel quite honoured by being invited for realizing
this part of the programme. As I noted on the internet site of MacMillans, in Thailand it was
the King himself and in England it was the Duke of Edinburgh who played a prominent role in
the presentations there, so I tend to conclude that our Queen may feel a little offended about not
being invited to do what I am doing here right now, although perhaps she would have declined the
invitation so as to be able to restore the peace in the royal family.
The programme says that Im here for an introductory talk and a welcome, so let me start with the
welcome; which is, according to MacMillan Dictionary for the Advance Learner,
to greet someone in a polite and friendly way when they have come to see you or help
you
You have not come to help me, I guess, so I can try welcome2 which says that my use of that word
expresses that I am pleased that youre here.

Well, this sounds better: I am pleased that you are here, but there is still a third option: welcome3 .

An act of welcoming or greeting someone. And theres even a welcome4 . You see, dictionary life
is quite difficult: many options are around and a dictionary is not really an algoritm leading you to
just one place: it provides options rather than certainty.
As you may have noticed, I have not yet really welcomed you because I did not do a couple
of things that belong to the speech act of welcoming. Those things are generally not found in
a dictionary but in linguistic-philosophical papers. So, I welcome you on behalf of MacMillan
Publishers Limited, in particular its Education department, but also on behalf of the local host, the
3

Utrecht University, in particular its Institute of Linguistics UILOTS, of which I am a member. But
that is not sufficient. Welcome3 , remember, the act of welcoming, also involves telling what you
may expect given the programme. Well, my task is to say something about dictionaries without
taking the ground from under Professor Gwyneth Fox feet. She will be the main speaker about
MacMillans English Dictionary this afternoon and I welcome her personally now in that capacity.
The best way to avoid doubling is to tell you things that Gwyneth cannot know, because these
things have remained too local, so to say, Dutch being a language unknown to her and current
Dutch culture including or excluding the poldermodel being incomprehensible for foreigners. So,
by now, you all should feel at ease, so I can safely assume that you will agree that welcome2a does
not apply to the present situation:

if someone tells you that you are welcome to something, they mean that you can have
it or use it, usually because they do not want it or do not like it themselves

I have to distance myself from this use of welcome, because I think you should have or use the
MacMillan Advanced learners dictionary without implying that I dont like it. On the contrary, I
like it very much, as I shall point out later on.
Having said something positive, I venture to make the first mildly critical and yet considerate
remark, which I need to do in order to show that I am an independent scholar interested in the
making of the most difficult intellectual product there is: a dictionary. Critical, because the plural
pronoun they, of course, cannot refer back to someone. It occurred in two cases that I discussed
so far and you can quickly see that its endemic. Mildly critical because you see the problem:
they mean abbreviates he or she means, the modern politically correct stylistic monstrum. So I
understand the decision to overrule grammar here and mildness comes in as soon as you realize
how difficult life is for the makers of a dictionary because it is always so easy to find something
that can be improved on. I used the term considerate to express the feeling that I understand this
sort of easy going language in a dictionary. It is the direct line to the Cobuild experience that the
authors of the present dictionary want to maintain. And anaphoric deviations, not uncommon in
spoken language, are the price to be paid. After two weeks of reading in the dictionary and thinking
about it, I tend to find this easy going aspect of the word definitions quite agreeable.
What makes todays presentation here so interesting is that it concerns a dictionary made from
scratch. In an amazingly short period, the MacMillan has produced this Advanced Dictionary.
Dutch (this is for Gwyneth) is a language spoken by about 20 million people. Our captains of
industry require that we worship their heroic Dutch sense of enterprise based on good competition,
leaving to us to solve the paradox that there is practically a monopoly situation in the domain of
advanced learning dictionaries: de Grote Van Dale. No competition in the polder. This monopoly
extends to the bilingual dictionaries, if we consider the books in the range of 1500 pages per unidirectional volume. So the best Advanced ones (if I can use this term to generalize over dictionaries
weighing more than 1 kilogram (allow me to use a continental measure unit)) are all published by
Van Dale.
4

But the question is, of course: does the best mean good or good enough. Opinions seem to
differ. Let us say the Van Dale people are prepared to improve on their products. But dont expect
a new competitive initiative from any of the other Dutch publishing houses. Rather than in investing
and competing our captains of industry seem to be interested in just two letters in their dictionaries:
the O of options and the B of bonuses. So, it is the British private market that enters today into
the Dutch situation in order to provide for more competition. I am very curious, of course, to see
whether a joint French-German counter movement (maybe supported by the Russians or by some
of the New-Europeans) will take place, but let us first get accustomed to MacMillan as a newcomer
in the Dutch dictionary world.
Does the newcomer bring a new sense of competition? Well, let me start to challenge Van Dale
with a simple question: what will happen to their English-Dutch and Dutch-English Advanced
dictionaries, if people start with a pocket dictionary published by one of the other Dutch publishers
and then immediately are going to use MacMillans monolingual dictionary of English? Its not
that bad to do such a thing. So, the presentation today is in some sense an interesting warning:
Van Dale take care of your quality. Im sure Van Dale will take this to heart because they have
turned out to be good sports. And I am sure they will compete. (Now, I ask you to be honest to
yourselves: did you notice the anaphoric reference from the pronoun they to Van Dale in the last
two sentences and did you feel the temptation to protest? No! You see how considerate you can
be.
At the end of the seventies the monopoly situation I just sketched had not yet been established.
So, Elsevier (yes, the maker of encyclopedias) decided to add a two-volume dictionary to their 20
Volumes encyclopedia with the aim of competing with Van Dale. An ambitious project. I was
one of the four editors involved (Wim Klooster, Frans Daems and Riemer Reinsma were the other
three). Halfway, Elsevier observed that it no longer sold the number of encyclopedias that it used
to sell, so they sold the whole project to the Publishing House Het Spectrum. At the very moment
that the blueprint for the project was ready and that the whole infrastructure necessary to execute
the plan was ready, Het Spectrum decided that the economical situation was that bad (for the Dutch
among us, Bestek 81), that the project was to stop. So it stopped, leaving four architects without
their building but with some ideas about how to make a dictionary from scratch.
I must confess that retrospectively I am a sort of glad that the project failed to be realized. Firstly,
because if you have only two competitors in a relatively small domain, the public will always stick
to just one of the two (see the Guide Michelin and the Gault Millau in the much larger domain
of traveling). Secondly, if you see what the current technical tools are able to do now, then the
conclusion must be that a dictionary from scratch was too early at the time. And thirdly, now I can
criticize dictionaries rather than being criticized, which makes life easier.
Although I promised you and Gwyneth Fox to go local, I cannot stop here without saying some
more words about the dictionary itself. It would be an offense not to do that, I think, the more so
because I am not a mayor welcoming you but a linguist involved in the dictionary business itself.
Silence would mean a sign of polite negligence. So, I intend to say a few words about the content
from the point of view of my blueprint experience coupled to a very intriguing project running here
in Utrecht in the nineties and involving the architecture of dictionaries in view of the need to use
5

internet both as a way to obtain word meanings and encyclopedic information. The project was
called the Ideal Dictionary. We formulated a number of criteria necessary to warrant quality such
as consistency, correctness, completeness, these being familiar from the study of logical formal
languages. In the remainder of my talk, I will make some comment on MacMillans Advanced
Dictionary based on this theoretical exercise around the Ideal Dictionary.
First, it is clear that a start from scratch offers a very good opportunity to make the book really
consistent because all dictionaries with ten or twenty or more impressions cannot escape from the
inconsistencies of the past which are inevitably due to the hand-made construction of dictionaries
in the pre-computerized past. You will agree, by the way, that it is not so much the use of corpora
that makes a dictionary good or excellent, it is rather the consistency of the blueprint underlying the
making of the entries. I think that the present Dictionary has an very high degree of consistency. I
give an example of which I am fond: the name of the chess pieces.

You see them all and Macmillan treats them all consistently identifying them in the entries of rook,
pawn, queen, etc. simply as belonging to the domain of chess and leading to a picture so that you
can recognize them. No more information is necessary: the pictures invite you to go to handbooks
6

on Chess, where you get explained what you need to play the game. On Internet you can play
chess against a computer.
Let us have a concrete look at some other features of MacMillans Advanced that were on the list
of requirements of our Ideal Dictionary. One of them was to put some more visual information
into a dictionary. On internet this is easy to achieve, in book form this means pictures combining
nouns and verbs with visual information. The wish to have pictures (in Van Dale you do not find
them at all) derives from the so-called Beeldwoordenboeken (Picture Dictionaries), which turn out
to be so helpful if you happen to have a house in England and you have to buy tools whose name
you do not even know in Dutch. This is exactly what Macmillan does. A very nice feature also if
you are interested in applying correctly the term hatchback to a car in order to distinguish it from
a saloon or if you want to apply the word cockroach to a cockroach rather than to a beetle.

One of the horrible things for a Dutch person trying to write correctly in a foreign language is to
find the proper colloquial expressions and information about which prepositions of particles come
with which verbs. Especially with verbs like go, stand or make and others, you find sometimes
more than a page full with information about how these verbs are used, preferably in very small
compact text blocks. After a while you get irritated and you put the dictionary aside trusting on
your own compass. How nice is it to have Macmillan available here: they first give a list at the
beginning, in the case of a verb like pass consisting of 17 different sorts of semantic subfields, so
7

that you can go directly the number that you want to visit. But then the dictionary also gives the
uses of this verb with different prepositions with each preposition starting in a new paragraph.
It is also very nice to see that a lot of nouns are given a list with the adjectives that are most
frequently used with them. Thats really helpful: it helps you to use adjectives like great, brilliant,
excellent, kind, skilled, etc. in the appropriate semantic subfields rather than only good. So it
provides near-synonyms. There is also another intriguing feature that fulfills the wish of many
dictionary users: sometimes room has been made for a metaphoric excursion, as in the case of
conversation. But I will not show them on sheets. Id rather stop here before I am really going to
break into the domain of the next speaker.
It is time now to let Gwyneth Fox do the talking, but before giving her the floor I would like to say
a couple of things about her. Professor Fox started as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language
in the domain of applied linguistics lecturer and then turned lexicographer. She was in on the very
first day of the famous Cobuild project, and worked on it for 17 years, running the project for the
last 7 or 8 of those years as Publishing Director. This all happened in Birmingham. All the time
she continued to do some lecturing, which she did more of for a couple of years after having left
Cobuild in 1998. She was then asked by Macmillan to work with them on their new dictionary.
At first she said no, but then thought it might be fun to do so. And she will tell you about the
incredibly short period of four years in which she and her team made the Advance dictionary and
at least one spinoff. I have the honour now of handing the floor to you, Professor Fox. The floor is
yours.