“My day consists of sifting through citations of words in context and puzzling over how to succinctly describe the glob of dust and crud that makes up a dust bunny,” she wrote. (Ms. Stamper said she settled on “aggregate.”)

It’s exciting to think of dictionaries in more dramatic terms: as battlegrounds where the fate of the language is decided, or as shadowy enterprises with secret, back-room meetings over what does and does not count as a word. These images flourish because of widespread misconceptions in the popular imagination about how dictionaries get made.

One of my favorite recent portrayals of lexicography, once again involving the O.E.D., was in a 2008 episode of Comedy Central’s “The Sarah Silverman Program.” On the show, Ms. Silverman’s character tries to popularize a new slang word (“ozay”), but her friend Brian ends up finding more success with his own coinage (“dot-nose”). By the end of the episode, dot-nose has become so popular that an O.E.D. editor pays Brian a visit to tell him it is entering the dictionary, inviting him to the official “Word Induction Ceremony.”

Sad to say, there is no such thing as a Word Induction Ceremony, though dictionary publishers do try to milk some publicity out of batches of new words added to their latest editions. Still, the scene highlights the common belief that admission to a dictionary (especially a prestigious one like the O.E.D.) awards “official” status to a new word. And if the Almighty Dictionary is the anointer of wordhood, then surely those who make these decisions must be blessed with some sort of semi-divine authority!

This view of The Dictionary as the ultimate arbiter of our shared language is one that dictionary editors themselves are quick to disown. “Lexicographers do not sit in sleek conference rooms and make your language,” Ms. Stamper wrote on her blog. “That’s what you — the reading, writing, speaking public — do. Language is democratic, not oligarchic. That’s where the real glamour is.”

The humdrum life of the lexicographer, patiently documenting what language is rather than decreeing how it should be, doesn’t mean that the dictionary world is devoid of sensational stories. Simon Winchester told one such story in “The Professor and the Madman,” about one of the O.E.D.’s most prolific early contributors, William Minor — who happened to conduct his research locked up in a lunatic asylum after committing murder.

And dictionaries do play a role in legitimate controversies, like the continuing political battle over defining “marriage.” Lexicographers may want to stay away from such contentious issues, but the authoritative power of their dictionaries means they’re inevitably caught up in such definitional wars — even as they try to stay above the fray and describe language without worrying about the sensitivities of one side or another in a political dispute.