Maria Zijlstra: Hiya! I'm Maria Zijlstra with Lingua Franca here on ABC Radio National and, today, I’m talking to Erin McKean, who was the star turn at the national conference of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English held last week. And here is someone who has such fortitude of character that she already knew, at the age of eight, that it was a lexicographer that she was to be, and which she has been these past couple of decades.

Still crazy about words, she’s the founder of the website Wordnik that claims to be ‘the most comprehensive English dictionary in the world’ and, before that, was the editor in chief of the American dictionaries of Oxford University Press.

Is that where you started out then, Erin?

Erin McKean: Oh no. My first lexicographical job was as a volunteer on the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. Assyrian is Babylonian cuneiform. I don’t know any Babylonian cuneiform and I'm not an Assyriologist, but they had a volunteer program where I got to do the kind of mechanical apparatus of dictionary making: I filed things, I underlined things in manuscript and, you know, just general helpfulness. And it was a dictionary built on the old model, lots of cards, lots of citations, it's in the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, and it actually just completed this past year. So, an immense world-class project, and it was a beautiful place to start out.

I was taking a linguistics degree, so there was a lot of overlap between the people who studied Near Eastern languages and cultures and the linguistics department. So one of my professors in the linguistics department, I think, had pointed it out to me, because he himself was working on a dictionary of Sumerian but didn't have any volunteer opportunities, so he said, 'Go talk to the Assyrian people.'

Maria Zijlstra: From there can we jump to Wordnik because it is the dictionary remade or revamped perhaps in the image of what inspires you and I think what you hope will ignite the passion for words in others in a way that the more traditional kind of dictionary maybe doesn't anymore. So what is Wordnik?

Erin McKean: At base I feel that Wordnik is a way to connect people with meaning. If you think of a traditional dictionary as trying to present meanings in an orderly way, it does that, but it's these tiny little portholes on meaning. Like, the definition of a word is only one narrow view of what it means; there's social meaning and there's associative meaning, there are all sorts of other ways that words can mean. And with Wordnik I wanted to broaden the range of available meanings for every word for everybody, that's why we try and show pictures from Flickr, and that's why we show Tweets from Twitter, and that's why we let people leave comments about what a word means to them. And there's this kind of meta-level of meaning as well, so if you're a logged-in Wordnik user you can give a word some love, you can actually click on a word that says 'love' and little hearts appear around the word and it gets added to your favourite list. And knowing that five or seven or 20 people have loved a word is another kind of meaning around that word.

Maria Zijlstra: So it's online.

Erin McKean: Only online.

Maria Zijlstra: It's using and linked up with a whole lot of other technological possibilities, availabilities, usabilities…

Erin McKean: Yes, connects to other services.

Maria Zijlstra: …and provides free-range definitions.

Erin McKean: Yes, it provides traditional definitions where we have them, but there are so many words that have never been defined in a traditional dictionary that we look for sentences occurring in newspapers and magazines and blog posts elsewhere on the web where a really good journalist has taken the time to explain what a term means to his or her audience. And journalists do this all the time, it's like stock and trade for journalists. And when we can identify those sentences we call them free-range definitions because they're out in the wild, they act like definitions, they convey meaning really well in a natural, colloquial, conversational way, and they actually do better oftentimes in conveying the important parts about a word's meaning than a traditional dictionary definition does.

Maria Zijlstra: And the other thing that you explain so well is that standard dictionaries, they're hard to use. There is a kind of burdensomeness about them. Kids, when you say to them...you know, when they say, 'What does this mean?' Or if you ask them, 'Do you know what that means, what that word means?' And they start to glaze over, they start to resist, they start to kind of bow down a little bit or droop and say, 'No', because they know what's coming next, you know: 'Have you looked it up in the dictionary? Don't you think you should do that?' 'Okay.'

Erin McKean: It becomes a rite of obligation. It's because there is a lot of overhead involved with a dictionary that is almost all related to it being in print, because there's so much data that has to be contained between two hard covers that it just gets compressed and compressed and compressed. I joke that dictionary definitions are the world's most lossy compression format. You've got all this data in the world and you've got to scrunch it down. So there's a lot of shorthand, there's a lot of conventions, there are a lot of things that are conveyed through position on the page, through little symbols. And we are expecting people who don't spend their lives immersed in this one tool to be experts at using it. And even though there is a manual in the front, nobody reads it, because they jump in, they think that they know what to do. And most of the time they do, but when they don't, they really don't.

Maria Zijlstra: The other thing about them, apart from the compression is that...well, maybe it goes with the compression...is that they are kind of tied down; they don't inspire you much. I don't know, it's like Gulliver's Travels, you know that image of Gulliver all tied down and they've got everything so that it can't move.

Erin McKean: Ropes and stakes!

Maria Zijlstra: Yeah, yeah! There's not a lot of inspiration there, in contradiction with Wordnik which provides a whole lot of ways to interface with the word apart from its essential meaning.

Erin McKean: The problem with the size of print dictionaries is it tends to homogenisation. So if you have to define something, unless you are something like the OED, you can't actually give five or six or seven example sentences for every sense of the word, and the example sentences are where the meat and the flavour are, the definition is the lowest common denominator. And so in a print dictionary you're going to look up something because you're interested in it, and what is given to you is just completely scraped of all interest. It has been boiled down to kind of bland paste, and it does the language a disservice in a way.

Maria Zijlstra: Well it comes back, doesn't it, to the point of the whole exercise. I mean, a dictionary gives you an essential meaning, but your Wordnik is doing something else, isn't it?

Erin McKean: Yes, in a way. It is trying not to give a meaning but trying to give a spectrum of meanings, because I'm a firm believer in that you can't really say what something means out of context. Certainly you can say what the chemical element argon is, that's a thing, but to say whether a word like 'obstreperous', right, what does that mean in context? You can say that it means kind of argumentative, but most times when people used the word 'obstreperous' they're using it in a humorous context, like you're saying that somebody is being obstreperous in a jokey way, and the dictionary definition doesn't necessarily get that across. And that's where I feel like being able to show a lot of example sentences, being able to show tags and related words and pictures and Tweets gives you a fuller, more organic, more holistic picture of how a word is really used, because we pick up on so many of these cues subconsciously.

Maria Zijlstra: That's all to do with expression, isn't it, and yeah, that's what words are about, they are expressions of stuff, ideas, facts, but a whole lot of other things, nuances. You know, you can use the same kind of vocabulary in a situation to fit in, so there's all the social ways in which we use words. But that is maybe the essential difference then between Wordnik and other dictionaries. The point of Wordnik or what it's doing is fostering expression rather than providing you with the distilled meaning.

Erin McKean: Yes. In fact sometimes I think of Wordnik, in fact often I talk about Wordnik as building a map of the whole English language. And if you think about a map, a map can have a whole bunch of different layers, you can have just the street grid view, and then you can overlay more and more things on top of the map. You can say, okay, show me where all the cafes are in the street grid view, and how about you show me topology as well, and what is the vegetation like on top of all this, and okay show me where all the hotspots of population are. And you can have multiple layers on the same grid that give you more and more information. So you can pare away to the view that you particularly want, or you can try and see everything at once so you can get the fullest picture.

Maria Zijlstra: Erin, in your keynote address at the national conference of the Australian Association for the Teachers of English last week you told about your hunger for words and how as a child you read absolutely everything that came into the house. You said that if your parents didn't want you to read something, they would have to lock it up in the trunk of the car. Did they actually do that?

Erin McKean: I think my mom did that a couple of times, you know, novels that she thought I wasn't quite ready for, because once I made it through my quota of library books for the week I just naturally moved on to hers. So she is a big reader as well, and lots of mystery books and so forth. I think there were a couple of books that she was, like, you know what, you're not quite ready for this at eight or nine or ten or however old I was.

Maria Zijlstra: I suppose you've mulled over why you are so attracted to words.

Erin McKean: I just feel that the amount of information that a single word can carry or the amount of feeling that it can connote is so interesting, and taking the words apart and putting them back together again, the morphology of English so that you have all these affixes and prefixes and suffixes that you can use to playfully create more words, and the fact that you can take two or three bits of words from English and shove them all together and use that for the first time, and the person that you're talking to knows exactly what you mean.

So, for instance, we're here in a radio studio and I could talk about whether something had 'microphoneability', and you would probably know kind of what I meant. That kind of power I think is really interesting, and it's beautiful. When people make a new word that is evocative and useful all at the same time, that's an act of human creation that should be recognised.

Maria Zijlstra: I think it's absolutely marvellous the way that you have livened up lexicography. And you've shared it with all of us, so thank you very much.

Erin McKean: Oh, you’re very welcome.

Maria Zijlstra: Here in this great south island for the national conference of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English that was held last week, Erin McKean. You can find a link to the online dictionary that she founded, Wordnik, on the webpage for this week’s Lingua Franca. It’s an experience you don’t want to pass up. And there’s a link as well as to the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary that she worked on as a volunteer many moons ago, another fascinating project, not least because it took 90 years to do, but also because of what it tells about our past, on the WWW at <abc.net.au/rn/linguafranca>.