I can't think of any volume that has been quoted and referenced on this board more often than The Dictionary. But we do not often consider the lexicographer or his task, which cannot be an easy one. Johnson remarks in his Preface, "Every other authour may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been granted to very few." The opportunies for error and omission are so great that a critic is challenged in merely discriminating large faults from small ones.

So in light of the fact that it seems to have been viewed in a negative way, if at all, does anyone care to delve into the art and craft of lexicography?

... or so Dr Johnson must have believed. He defined lexicographer, in his first dictionary, as "a harmless drudge".

To be a really good and prolific lexicographer it appears the only place to be is clapped up in Broadmoor on a lifer. Committing murder while insane, it appears, is good for the lexicographical soul.

Seriously, though, nothing to do with words can be considered a "science", at least in the same way as physics or chemistry is. Compiling a dictionary which meets the objective of the provision of information about words in an accessible way has got to be more a matter of good judgement than of perfect methodology.

> got to be more a matter of good judgement than of perfect methodology.

Far enough, but can you define methodology, please!
Those who first took it upon themselves to compile the first dictionaries (e.g. the Grimms) certainly had the prerogative to structure the book how they chose. This made their work artistic, I think. Some of the new projects for referencing language being developed online warrant similar merit as well.
If you work for a dictionary that already has a strict methodology(sic) for the introduction of new words and their uses though, then most of the time, surely all you are doing is feeding information through the parsing and standardising system of your company. Right? That's hardly artistic, is it?

From A. Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary:
LEXICOGRAPHER, n.
A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be considered "as one having authority," whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statue. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as "obsolete" or "obsolescent" and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor -- whereby the process of improverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that "it isn't in the dictionary" -- although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy preservation -- sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion -- the lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which his Creator had not created him to create.

I had always thought it *notable that some dictionaries were considerably smaller than others. It seemed someone was slacking, somehow. Pocket versions could be *justified (except for when I was looking up a new word).

So, my question is, what's the difference between art and craft?

I ....must.....resist......temptation.

C.R.A.F.T.-
Can't Remember A Fu**ing Thing-Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

Would that then make A.R.T.

A Remember(ed) Thing?