The ATA Chronicle - May/June 2017 - 25

OUR WORLD OF WORDS: SPOTLIGHT ON T&I PROFESSIONALS

BY TONY BECKWITH

Interview with John Ayto, Lexicographer

I

admit it, I love words. Consequently,
I have always been fascinated by
dictionaries and have a certain
reverence for lexicographers-those
who compile them. Among the many
dictionaries on my shelves, the Dictionary
of Word Origins is an old favorite. It
contains the histories of more than 8,000
words in the English language: just my
cup of tea. The author of this book is
the British lexicographer John Ayto, who
graciously agreed to be interviewed for
this column.
After earning a degree and doing
research on medieval English at Durham
University, Ayto joined the Longman
publishing house in 1974 to work on
the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary
English, a ground-breaking dictionary
for foreign learners of English. He
later became managing editor of their
dictionary department, working on
native-speaker dictionaries. He left in
the mid-1980s to become a freelance
lexicographer, and subsequently
produced the Bloomsbury Dictionary of
Word Origins, Bloomsbury Dictionary of
Euphemisms, Oxford Dictionary of Slang,
Oxford Dictionary of Rhyming Slang, and
20th Century Words, among others. He
also edited the 17th edition of Brewer's
Dictionary of Phrase & Fable. He has
taught courses in lexicography at Surrey
University, written a column on words in
the Observer newspaper, and appeared
from time to time on radio and television,
talking (of course) about words.

I'd like to begin by asking whether your family
background played any part in your decision
to become a lexicographer. I ask because
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), perhaps the
most famous British lexicographer (do you
agree?), was the son of a bookseller, which
very likely influenced the Dictionary of the
English Language he wrote and published in
1755. Did you have any similar influences?
I certainly don't come from a long line of
lexicographers! No, my father's skills, for
example, lay more in the areas of science
and technology than in the arts. But my
parents did encourage me in the habit
www.atanet.org

on a new dictionary project. I thought it
might be a good fit for my skills, applied,
got the job, and the rest is history.

Where and when did lexicography, the specific
field, begin? Is there much to see from that
period, much surviving material? What is the
earliest dictionary ever found? How similar
was it to contemporary dictionaries?

We recognized that foreign
learners needed to know not just
what words mean, but how they
behave grammatically.
of reading, which was a decisive first
step. And, yes, I certainly agree about
Dr. Johnson. I'm sure that if you asked
the average Brit to name a lexicographer,
you would mostly be met with a blank
stare, but the few who did reply would
say Johnson.

What originally sparked your interest in
lexicography as a specific field? Or was
it more of a gradual process, one thing
leading to another? How did you come to
specialize in lexicography?
Studying English at school, I found my
interest being drawn to the medieval
period (Chaucer et al.), as much for the
fascination of the language as for the
quality of the writing. I went on to earn a
degree in medieval English, and then for
my postgraduate work, I edited a Middle
English text, which involved producing
a glossary. Up to that point I hadn't
remotely thought of lexicography as a
possible career, but then I happened to
see an ad in a journal for people to work

There's evidence of Akkadian/Sumerian
wordlists from the third millennium
BC, and interlinear glosses in medieval
manuscripts are clear precursors of
modern dictionaries. But it wasn't really
until the introduction of printing that
dictionaries as we recognize them today
came on the scene. The earliest ones
were bilingual (Sir Thomas Eliot's LatinEnglish dictionary of 1538, for example).
The first monolingual English dictionary
is generally accepted as being Robert
Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall (1604).
But, following the model of the earlier
bilingual dictionaries, this was what is
known as a "hard-word dictionary"-it
only included words that the compiler
thought his readers might not know the
meaning of. It wasn't until the late 17th
century that the trend toward including
all the words in the language became
established, a trend that was confirmed
by the triumphant success of Johnson's
1755 dictionary. We live with the
consequences today, in dictionaries that
contain much redundant information
about things we already know (such as
the meaning of chair).

You have said that words are the servants
of events. Could you flesh that idea out a
little for us?
The idea of words as servants of events
applies most obviously to names for
things. Entities that never existed before
are coming into being constantly, and we
have to have some label with which to
refer to them. That may in some cases be
determined by some official body (as in
scientific nomenclature), but more often it
involves a gradual process of trial and error.
See, for example, the various attempts to
find a name for television until television
eventually came out on top.
American Translators Association

25
http://www.atanet.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The ATA Chronicle - May/June 2017
