Fiat Lex: A Dictionary Podcast

New word updates (like the one that American Heritage just announced!) are super sexy, but the real work that goes into your shiny new dictionary is invisible. Today, Steve and Kory take you down the meandering, Lovecraftian rabbithole of print copyright updates, when we disappear dictionary content that no one loves to make room for "twerk" and "baconnaise." What makes a new dictionary a copyright update versus a new edition? How ...

Part two of our excellent interview with lexicographer, language expert, tailor/tinker/soldier and spy, Jesse Sheidlower. We continue our discussion about The F-Word and the f-word; touch on slang dictionaries; talk about verisimilitude in movie or TV dialogue and Jesse's work as a language consultant for the Amazon series "The Man in The High Castle"; geek out about every lexicographer's favorite movie (and gab about the verbing o...

Steve and Kory have a special treat this week: the first half of our interview with lexicographer, author, bon vivant, raconteur, and damn fine human being Jesse Sheidlower. He talks about how he was sucked into the gaping maw of lexicography by Lord Byron's "tool," inadvertently became the hero of a novel set at Random House, wrote this little book called The F Word that resulted in the accidental utterance of said f-word on NPR a...

all·sorts ('ôl-ˌsôrts) noun plural : a mixture of assorted confections (such as licorice); often used figuratively

Today's episode is an assortment of colorful treats that, like licorice allsorts, stick unpleasantly to your teeth and coat your tongue with a weird film! In a figurative way. Steve and Kory dig into the mailbag and answer YOUR QUESTIONS about crowdsourced dictionaries, reading rooms, raisins, the plum brandies of cent...

If you've been listening to this podcast, you know that mistakes happen. In the case of this particular podcast, they happen often! And they happen in dictionaries, too. We hope you were sitting down when we told you that. This episode is alllllll about mistakes. Steve and Kory issue corrigenda/errata for earlier episodes (and Kory can't figure out the difference between "corrigenda" and "errata"), then take you through the byzanti...

What kind of a person writes dictionaries for a living? It helps to have what Steve calls "an early awareness of language." It's Old Home Fortnight at Fiat Lex, where Steve and Kory talk about growing up around other languages, studying German and Czech during the fall of Communism, which dictionaries they grew up with (Random House '66 REPRESENT), and why it took Steve decades to learn the English word for "wooden spoon." While wa...

Think you might be good at this lexicography racket? This episode will change your mind--or, at least, it should if you had any sense whatsoever. A good chunk of the job is mastering some of the most mundane publishing details imaginable, and that includes the subject of today's episode: the dots in the mid·dle of the head·words in your dic·tion·ary (or dic·tion·ar·y, depending on which of the damned things you're using). Steve and...

Lexicographers have a tweaked view of the language, and that includes hard words. No, not those hard words, like “koinonia” and “marocain” (Spelling Bee shoutout!). It's the small words are the ones that make lexicographers weep. Steve and Kory take a look back at some of the hard words they've defined, and along the way, Steve talks parts of speech and forks up the conversation in the best possible way. Kory drops some nerd histor...

Lots of people use dictionaries not for the definitions--who cares about those?--but for the pronunciations. Steve and Kory talk about how those pronunciations came to be, and why the pronunciation editor gets to watch TV all day instead of getting a REAL JOB. They explain what that stupid bananapants alphabet that American dictionaries use for pronunciations is, drop some hot history on how pronunciations got into dictionaries, an...

If "irregardless" isn't a real word, then why the hell is it in my dictionary?!? It's a matter of philosophy. Steve and Kory give a primer on descriptivism and prescriptivism, two approaches to describing language, and how modern dictionaries are descriptivist (which is exactly the opposite of what everyone believes). They recap the culture wars of the 1960s, which gave rise to the American Heritage Dictionary; discuss the AHD Usag...

Welcome to Fiat Lex, a podcast about dictionaries by people who write them! Yes, really.

Meet Kory and Steve, your intrepid and nerdy lexicographer-hosts who will give you the drudge's-eye view of English and dictionaries in all their weirdness. In our first episode, we:

- blow your minds by telling you that "the dictionary" doesn't exist; - talk about how new words get into dictionaries (not by petition, so STOP ASKING) and how t...