This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 8: People who make dictionaries: Review of WORD BY WORD by Kory Stamper. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 8 shownotes page.

[Theme music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: and I’m Lauren Gawne. And today we’re going to be talking about how dictionaries get made. But first, bonus episodes! We have them. We now have bonus episodes about how to teach yourself even more linguistics with our top recommendations for books, videos, and further resources for self-study, as well as our first bonus episode about swearing.

Gretchen: and this month’s bonus on Patreon is about how to sell your awesome linguistic skills to employers. Or you can check out the Patreon at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or just follow the link on lingthusiasm.com to see those bonus episodes, support the show, and help Lingthusiasm keep growing.

[Music]

Lauren: Today we are talking dictionaries, which is a super exciting genre of book for linguists! This topic choice is for a number of reasons. The first of which is that Kory Stamper’s new book ‘Word By Word’ came out a couple of months ago and we both read it and we had the best fun reading it and we wanted to talk about it so much that we ended up just talking about it for this whole episode. The whole episode will kind of be framed around Kory’s book and some of the things that we really enjoyed about reading it, but that is not the only reason, is it Gretchen?

Gretchen: Yeah, and we’re also going to be talking about other stuff to do with dictionaries because I was recently on a panel about dictionaries at South by Southwest, and I also got to meet Kory and hang out with some other dictionary people – when she gave a talk in New York City I happen to be going down on that specific day.

Lauren: And so this episode will be another episode in the genre of ‘Gretchen makes Lauren really jealous by telling her about all the cool linguist and lexicography peeps that she got to hang out with’.

Gretchen: You just need to come here and come to a conference and then I can introduce you to everybody and it’ll be great!

Lauren: Yeah, but for now we’re all going to live vicariously through Gretchen’s excellent adventures.

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