I've selected twelve pairs of items of which there is {I trust) one American equivalent

and one British equivalent in each pair; the British equivalent comes first. These

Items all reflect what you might call the terminology of everyday life — the everyday

'lerminologicar differences in lexis between British and American English: they are

all nouns and they all refer to objects in the real world or to relatively specific

concepts. This terminological difference — different names for the same thing — is

the most striking but also the least important aspect of the lexical differences between

3Rinsh and American English. Nevertheless, some conclusions can be drawn from it.

The question is whether the British variant has own-place entry in the American

dictionaries and the American variant in the British dictionaries. There is a vast

difference in coverage. Of the American dictionaries W₉ is the only one that comes

anywhere near a respectable score: it gets seven out of the twelve (the previous

edition, had exactly the same score even before the Merriam-Longman

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collaboration had begun). Now consider the scores of the British dictionaries. Seven is i very bad score from that point of view. CED gets all twelve right. COD (perhaps the smallest of the dictionaries) and GID each gets eleven, LDEL gets ten. Chambers gets rsr. Clearly the British dictionaries are much more aware of American English than the ■Hoiencan dictionaries are of British English. This should come as no surprise to imbody, but it's interesting to have it so clearly documented. It also ties in with the гэс! that British dictionaries tend to label Briticisms — the home variety — being in ■-л sense, too, aware of American English as an alternative standard.*

The problem of dealing with British and American English is not, of course, >:mp!y a problem of whether you enter a word or not. Far, far from it. Having entered j word, how do you treat it? At this point 1 must apologise to the working *xicographers here because I'm going to talk about mistakes. Most of the time when tjs words are in they are correctly treated. But that is not interesting, What is jneresting are the failures. And I've classified the failures under several simple readings.

The first mistake that you can make in treating a variety of English other than уж own I call 'mindless provincialism'. Sometimes, in fact, the provincialism is rather subtle. Consider, for example, the motorway sense of cloverleaf. In W₉ it is jefined as follows:

a road plan passing one highway over another and routing turning traffic onto connecting roadways which branch only to (he right and lead around in a circle to enter the other highway from the right and thus merge traffic without left-hand turns or direct crossings

Note the use of the words left and right. Now compare the corresponding definition from LDEL:

something that resembles clover leaf in shape; specif, a road junction that resembles a four-leaved clover, connects two roads at different levels, and merges traffic without the need for streams of traffic to cross

Гзе i.Dt.l. definition captures the image, showing that a claverleaf is called a ^overleaf because (from the air or on the drawing-board, at least) it looks like one. But more important now is that the LDEL definition is valid for all countries, whereas I'm sure you realise that the W₉ definition is valid only for those benighted countries that drive on the right. In this respect W$'s failure is egregious - but for the noblest of motives. W₉ treated claverleaf to the true majesty of an encyclopaedic technical definition and wanted to get every single detail in. LDEL gave fewer details but made sure that they were all directly relevant to the prototype cloverleqf. In defining, too many details can be almost as bad as too few if they portray a token rather than the type.

Related to this is the problem of illustrations. Neither LDEL nor W\ has an illustration of a cloverleaf, which I think would benefit from one. Ж? did have an illustration, which was dropped from W_h perhaps inadvertently. But Щ 's illustration was wrong — limited in just the way that the definition in W$ (and Wn) is limited, showing traffic whizzing round on the right. If you want an illustration what kind of illustration will you choose? I think you've got only two options. You can work out a very schematic diagram that will give only the bare essence of the cloverleaf and will be valid for all countries Or you can use two small illustrations (which can be more detailed), one valid for the right-hand drivers and one for the left-hand drivers. This is a kind of problem you have to face if you are indulging in real as opposed to merely hypothetical Anglo-American lexicographic cooperation.

Provincialism is not the only problem, however. A second problem concerns 'take-overs', which Robeit Burchfield had discussed in his Encounter articles. You can just take a definition over from one dictionary into another. Sometimes this works but sometimes it doesn't. LDEL didn't take over the Merriam definition of cloverleaf, thank heavens. But sometimes the wrong kind of take-over does occur, For example, consider heads in the coin sense (as in 'heads or tails'), which is dealt with as a sense of head in various dictionaries. I turn now, anticipating the next part of my discussion, to the two smaller learners' dictionaries derived from LDOCE. the

Bcitish LASDE and the American l.DAE. In the coin sense, heads is defined in LASDE

the front side of a coin which often bears a picture of the ruler's head

In LDAE the corresponding sense of heads is defined just the same. What could >: more straightforward? Until, that is, you start thinking about whose heads appear on > American coins as opposed to British coins This is a case of mindless take-over without adaptation of the definition in one dictionary by another. By contrast, in the British OP!), heads is defined as

the side of a coin on which the ruler's head appears

but, in the American ОАО derived from it, heads is defined, in the same place,

is

the side of a coin on which a person's head appears

I'm not sure whether this is valid for all countries (Ireland? Mexico?), but it is certainly much better than 'the ruler's head' from the point of view of Anglo-American inscription. Once again, detail has been sacrificed in the interest of greater generality.

My third kind of mistake is an even subtler one: it lias to do with relative frequency. I would ask you to consider the two words scoreless and goal/ess, and I *nould like to acknowledge my indebtedness to my colleague Michael Rundell for rernnng out the very interesting problem posed by these words, which can be used in ?jch expressions as 'a score/ess goalless draw'. I don't think that either of these »ords is exclusively British English or exclusively American English: both are World Hnghsh. Yet both Rundell and I suspect that scoreless is more likely to be used in ■\menca and goalless more likely to be used in Britain: scoreless games; goalless w-jiches. And this intuition is confirmed by the fact that the three American acoonaries all enter scoreless but none of them enters goal/ess. As for the British acnonaries, there is an extremely interesting picture: CED enters goalless only, COD enters goalless only. Chambers enters neither, LDEL enters both as mn-ons, which is appropriate in a large dictionary, and GID enters scoreless only. That isn't very nice for me to confess; nevertheless, 1 think Гт now in a position to explain it. Scoreless appeared in AHDj. Working from AMD; galleys to make up GID, what could be easier than simply to take over what was given — especially as scoreless didn't feel particularly American. And as neither scoreless nor goalless is a very important word, what could be easier also than to forget about goalless when doing the letter G, especially in the absence of adequate citational evidence? This is a very subtle point, but once again a point worth making if you're engaged on an actual Anglo-American transatlantic dictionary project. <...>

/V

In his opening remarks Randolph Quirk asked where the new ideas in lexicography were, and answered the question partly. I should like to end by adding that besides their good mainstream native-speaker general-purpose dictionaries, both Britain and America have centres of innovation in lexicography.

In Britain the centres of innovation are the monolingual learners' dictionary and the bilingual dictionary (about which latter I have said very little and will be unable to say more for lack of time). Certainly the learners' dictionary', with its emphasis on the encoding aspect of language and in some cases its use of a controlled defining vocabulary, is an important centre of innovation which may already have begun to affect native-speaker dictionaries.

Tn America there is also a centre of innovation, not enough appreciated there — let alone here. That is the children's dictionary'. The American children's dictionary as a genre is a remarkable achievement, There is a marvellously creative use of illustrations in such books. They have experimented with unorthodox defining techniques and sometimes with the replacement of definitions by examples only, as C.K, Ogden did in Basic by Examples (1933). Even more interesting, some have done

:n practice what many semanticists have advocated in theory: grouped senses by semantic categories across part-of-speech boundaries, as when the military senses of :hargc are explained next to each other even though some are nominal and some are verbal, by contrast with the practice of adult dictionaries, which is to put all the verbal senses of charge in one place and all the nominal senses of charge in another'- As Allen Walker Read points out in his article on dictionaries in the Encyclopaedia -■intannica, giving priority to semantic relatedness over part-of-speech identity was pioneered by E.L. Thorndike (see, for example, his Junior Illustrated Dictionafy of 1935). Thorndike's achievement has been carried on in a number of American children's and even teenagers' dictionaries, and deserves serious consideration for adult dictionaries too. Furthermore, American children's dictionaries have developed devices for helping their users to acquire 'the dictionary habit', and their writers have also created guides for teachers using the dictionaries with their pupils.