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Lindsay Rose Russell. 2018. Women and Dictionary Making: Gender, Genre, and English Language Lexicography

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ijl/ecz008

1477-4577

Blanca Arias-Badia,

Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies

To date, research concerned with sexism and androcentrism in the field of Lexicography has mainly focused on pointing to sex-role stereotypes conveyed in dictionary definitions, in lemma selection, or in the examples chosen by lexicographers to illustrate meanings. Likewise, male main characters, such as Samuel Johnson, James Murray, or Thomas Cooper, have starred the history of English lexicography as it has been told to us. In spite of the relevance of these accounts from the point of view of lexicography, there has been a lack of systematic research adopting a feminist, historiographical approach to dictionary making in a broader sense. Lindsay Rose Russell’s book Women and Dictionary Making effectively opens up new research paths in the field by placing the role played by women at the core of English lexicographical practice from as early as the 16th century to the modern day. The book is divided into five chapters and conclusions. Chapter 1 uses the collocations walking dictionary and sleeping dictionary to illustrate how, even in standard language use, “the social life of the genre is influenced by the social expectations of gender” (p. 6). While corpora reveal that the term walking dictionary is typically attributed to knowledgeable men, foreign women from whom men learnt languages in the context of a romantic affair used to be called sleeping dictionaries, thus reinforcing the notion of women as passive agents in the transmission of language skills. The chapter further introduces the aims and scope of the book and reports on the mixed research methods employed to begin “an alternative history” of dictionary making (p. 24).