by Communications Officer Comment Closed

Newsletter Fall 2026

Table of Contents

Member News

After a decade of research on the conceptualization of “German” and the considerable role of dictionaries in that process (besides fairy tales and “ethnographic” musings), Stefan Dollinger released a trade book in Standard Austrian German on Standard Austrian German: Österreichisches Deutsch: eine 300-jährige Liebesgeschichte, co-authored with Anneliese Rieger-Roschitz and Simon Schwaighofer, explains for people 14 and up how the originally two standards in German were “funnelled” into one by decree of Empress Maria Theresia in the 1770s and how the pan-German movement and notions of German “purity” hijacked the concept of German language. Nazi philologists (Eberhard Kranzmayer, Otto Höfler, among others) were rehired on false testimony after WWII, the former influencing the Wörterbuch der bairischen Mundarten in Österreich (WBÖ) for almost six decades and educating an army of Austrian dialectologists primed for pan-German perspectives. The authors show who WBÖ, one of the longest-funded research projects in Austria (since 1911/13) has been emphasized, to this day, at the expense of the Österreichische Wörterbuch (Austrian Dictionary) that documents the Austrian standard of German. While dialects under the One Standard German Axiom (OSGA) are always welcome, present-day Germanistik has an ongoing problem with Austria and its own, autonomous standard of German. While the book is in German and easily accessible, a more detailed title is in open access: https://www.nid-library.com/Home/ViewBook/512.

The key papers that the new book is based on are all in English and accessible here:

Will Lismore, a teacher at Memorial High School, Indiana, has started a school lexicography/history club called Scriptorium. As part of the club, he has begun compiling The Dictionary of Memorial English, a dictionary of the school’s history inspired by the principles of the Oxford English Dictionary. The first fascicle was completed in January of this year and consists of 47 pages of entries relating to the school’s history from 1900 to 1930.

Bajanyms: Toponymic Idioms in Barbadian English and Bajan (Peter Lang, 2026, pp. xxiv, 158. ISBN: 9783034360104 (hardcover) € 41.60) by Cristiano Furiassi is hot off the press.

Published by Peter Lang within the series International Folkloristics, edited by Wolfgang Mieder, retired professor of Folklore Studies at the University of Vermont, it includes a foreword by Jeannette Allsopp, founder and former director of the Richard and Jeannette Allsopp Centre for Caribbean Lexicography at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados.

The volume also features three endorsements, respectively by John Simpson, OBE, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Alissandra Cummins, director of the Barbados Museum & Historical Society and chair of the Barbados National Commission for UNESCO, and Tara Inniss, lecturer in History and Heritage Studies at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados.

Drawing on amateur glossaries as well as scholarly dictionaries, this book explores the idiomatic use of toponyms, or place names, either tied to Barbados or connected to the island’s colonial legacy, while chronicling its lexicographic tradition. By tracing their etymological origin and establishing their cultural relevance, the volume focuses on Barbadian toponymic idioms, namely Bajanyms, and their pivotal role in conveying collective memory and shaping national identity. When geographical names transcend their literal meanings and acquire figurative nuances, they carry historical significance, embody local folklore, and reflect societal values. Consequently, the cataloging of the idiomatic toponymic inventory of Barbadian English and Bajan offers insights into
their uniqueness. Dedicated to Barbadophiles, this homage to Barbadianness is intended to preserve the speech community’s linguistic heritage, at risk of fading in the face of modernization and globalization.

More details can be found on the publisher’s website: https://www.peterlang.com/document/1572002.

Michael Hancher announces his new book, Macaulay and English in India (Abington: Routledge, 2026).  ISBN 9781032454849. The book shows how Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) made significant contributions to three interrelated innovations: the construction of English as an academic discipline in Great Britain and India; the diffusion of English as a global language; and the international advance of “meritocracy” in education and professional life.

Qiran Jin writes: China Times has just announced that I received the Yu Chi-chung Special Award, the top prize in the China Times Cultural Foundation’s Young Scholar Awards, ranking first among this year’s recipients, for my work on the history of Chinese lexicography. The award comes with US$10,000. I very much appreciate the support of our Society!  

Stephen Turton has been awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council for ‘ENCOED: James Murray and the Correspondence Networks of the Oxford English Dictionary, 1879–1915’. Murray was the first chief editor of the OED, and in this role he received thousands of letters from contributors to the dictionary—co-workers, volunteers, advisors, and expert consultants—as well as members of the public seeking his guidance on word meaning, etymology, pronunciation, and spelling. The largest surviving collection of this correspondence is held by the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. It comprises about 7,400 letters sent from every continent bar Antarctica, although most correspondents lived in Britain.

This project aims to catalogue, transcribe, and annotate the entire collection of Murray’s editorial letters in the Bodleian and make the contents freely available online. For the lexicographers who created the OED’s first edition, Murray’s correspondence provided vital information about words and their histories. For modern dictionary scholars, the archive is an incomparable record of how the OED was made and used in the first decades of its publication. And for historical sociolinguists, the letters could prove to be a valuable source of data on variation and change in late 19th-century English. As Murray himself acknowledged, innovations have historically tended to appear in spoken and epistolary language years before reaching the ‘dignity’ of print.

‘ENCOED’ continues and expands on the work started by Charlotte Brewer and Turton in their 2021 pilot project, ‘Mapping the Murray Papers’, which published a selection of 114 letters from the Bodleian and other archives on MurrayScriptorium.org. (The pilot is described in ‘Aggravated Mischief: Editing and Digitizing the Papers of Sir James Murray’ in Dictionaries 42.1.) In addition to editing the rest of the Bodleian’s collection, ‘ENCOED’ will feature a prosopography, a world map, and a network graph that visualizes the topical and social connections between letters and correspondents. The letters will also undergo lemmatization and part-of-speech tagging to enable quantitative linguistic analysis.

The project will start in January 2027 and run for five years. DSNA members need no telling that 2028 will be a landmark year in English lexicography: the centenary of the completion of the OED’s first edition and the bicentenary of Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language. ‘ENCOED’ plans to celebrate the OED’s centenary with a series of public lectures held in Oxford’s Weston Library in 2028, and to commemorate both anniversaries with a conference devoted to 19th-century lexicography and its global legacies in 2030.

What have you been up to? The DSNA loves to share news of member projects, publications, programs, and more! Please send your news to dsna.membernews@gmail.com for inclusion; deadline for submissions for the Spring 2026 issue is 30 September 2026. You can also see and share what’s happening on DSNA’s Member Forum, Facebook, and Bluesky, or follow our LinkedIn page for news.

In Memoriam

Victoria Neufeldt (1939–2026)

Vicki Neufeldt passed away on Thursday, August 20, 2026. A remembrance will appear in the Spring 2027 issue of this newsletter.

Steven Wood

Steven Wood passed away on Monday, July 13, 2026.

DSNA26 Updates

Revised dates: The 26th Biennial Meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America at the University of California, Davis will now be held a week later than first announced, from June 23–26, 2027.

About the venue: We are excited to be hosted by the Native American Language Center in the UC Davis Department of Native American Studies, a hub for Indigenous language work at the confluence of the academy and the community. It’s an ideal venue for thought leadership and practical collaboration, building on the foundations laid at DSNA 24 ( on the lexicography of Indigenous languages) and DSNA 25 (on AI and the future of lexicography).

CALL FOR PAPERS

Abstracts for individual papers, panels, roundtables, and half- or full-day workshops are now being accepted for DSNA 26. In addition to individual papers, the conference will include moderated panels on lexicographical topics, plenary presentations, receptions, and a banquet featuring the address of DSNA President Lisa Berglund, Professor of English at SUNY Buffalo State University.

Presentations on any aspect of dictionaries, lexicography, and lexicology, historical or contemporary, are welcome. We particularly encourage presentations on artificial intelligence and lexicography, tools and processes for collaborative dictionary projects, arbitration of meaning in speech communities, and the lexicography of North American languages.

Papers/presentations: We invite abstracts for individual papers of approximately 250 words for presentations of 15 minutes. Proposals for remote presentations, or for one or more presenters to join remotely, will be considered.

Panels, roundtables, and workshops: We invite proposals for panels and roundtable discussions of up to 60 minutes, and half- or full-day workshops:

  • Proposals for panels should include a list of the moderator(s) and panel members in addition to an abstract of approximately 250 words.
  • Proposals for roundtables and workshops should include the format, a list of presenters/moderators, a topical agenda, and abstracts for any presentations.

Conference registration: Presenters must register for the conference. However, we intend to offer a hybrid attendance option for presentations and panels. If you wish to present but would need to do so remotely, please indicate this on your submission.

Deadline: Upload your submission to our submission portal by Friday, January 29, 2027. (https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/83404/submitter)

PLEASE NOTE: All presenters of conference papers must be members of the DSNA, but you need not be a member to submit an abstract. To join or renew membership, visit https://dictionarysociety.com/join/.

Dictionary Skills of the Future

The Dictionary Society of North America is pleased to announce Dictionary Skills of the Future, an initiative led by Dr. Jason Siegel, research fellow in lexicography at The University of the West Indies, and supported by the Society.

The aim is to create a DSNA-recommended curriculum that can be disseminated to public libraries, schools, and other institutions to teach their communities the most relevant skills for using information resources, especially dictionaries, effectively.

During his sabbatical year, Jason is also developing a workbook that will go beyond what one normally sees in a dictionary skills workbook, which has traditionally been aimed at supporting the use of a given publisher’s product. The workbook will help students and instructors to develop skills in how to select a dictionary, compare dictionaries to other information resources, and understand the differing results of finding lexical information via a dictionary, a search engine, or a chatbot. It will also have exercises for using dictionaries to teach important critical thinking skills, using dictionaries across the school curriculum, and more. And perhaps most important, it will include exercises expressly for populations not traditionally served by such resources, such as the Deaf and people with dyslexia.

The DSNA curriculum is intended to cover a wide range of topics. Over the next few months, the DSNA will send out periodic invitations with links to an interface where you can contribute ideas for skills – and even exercises – that you would like to see in the DSNA curriculum. Some of your suggestions may overlap with the workbook that Jason is developing, but your ideas will not be included in his work unless you expressly opt in. Keep an eye out for these invitations, as we would love the full range of expertise of our Society to be reflected in the curriculum.

Journal News

The society’s journal, Dictionaries, has an updated description:

Dictionaries: The Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America is a peer-reviewed journal, published twice each year, that covers all aspects of lexicography and lexical reference works, as well as areas of linguistic inquiry that relate to dictionary-making. We publish work by academic researchers, professional lexicographers, and activists in language documentation. In addition to research articles, the journal has the regular special features “Reference Works in Progress,” which reports on current lexicographical projects, and “Teaching Dictionaries,” in which we explore the teaching and practice of lexicography in the classroom, and reviews of substantial new dictionaries and works on lexicography. We welcome submissions relating to the lexicography of any language and especially encourage submissions relating to the languages of North America.

If you are interested in publishing in Dictionaries, you can find more information on our website: Information for Contributors.

A Notice from the DSNA Communications Officer

Eagle-eyed newsletter readers may have noticed that the publication information included at the end of this newsletter has, since the Spring 2026 issue, credited me as the DSNA Communications Officer. In this new role, I will be acting as the hub for communications to society members, not only via this newsletter but also on social media.

New social media accounts for the society have been set up on Bluesky and LinkedIn; we also continue to have a presence on Facebook. If you are a user of any of these platforms, please follow us there – and like and share our posts to help spread the news!

I’m very happy to be able to continue helping bring together people with an interest in dictionaries, lexicography and language, and I look forward to working with and for members of the society.

Rachel Fletcher

DSNA Small Project Grant 2025 Report: Martina Guzzetti

The Medicine in Women’s Lexicography (1700s–1800s) (MWL) project is a specialized side-project  emerging from a broader investigation into the historical evolution of wellbeing discourses in English  (spanning the 1500s to 1800s). While building a digital corpus from databases like ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online) and EEBO (Early English Books Online), a distinct gap became evident: reference works and dictionaries compiled by female authors (particularly within  neglected genres such as domestic lexicography and nursing/medical dictionaries) were largely omitted. To address this underrepresentation, the MWL project focuses on retrieving and analyzing  these female-authored texts to uncover their vital contribution to historical medical knowledge and  gendered healthcare discourses. 

Significant progress has already been achieved in the initial stage, which centered on nineteenth century Victorian women’s medical lexicography. Focusing on works by Honnor Violet Morten, Jessie Anne Fowler, and Emily Marjory Armstrong Stoney, an analysis of their prefaces and shared entries was conducted to understand authorial intent and structural design. These preliminary findings  were presented at two major international conferences in 2024: ICHLL14 at the University of  Westminster and INCSA 2024 at Durham University. Additionally, research across databases like the Wellcome Collection identified 13 titles in eighteenth-century domestic lexicography and 4 key nineteenth-century medical dictionaries.  

Thanks to the DSNA 2025 Grant, this project has expanded into its following crucial phase with the conclusion of primary institutional funding. The grant has supported a subscription to SketchEngine to compile and query a dedicated digitized sub-corpus which allowed for the textual analysis of medical entries (specifically, a pilot study focused on gendered healthcare topics like “feminine  distempers” was carried out). This preliminary analysis revealed, among other things, the hybrid nature of women’s domestic lexicography and the absence (at least in the eighteenth century) of a standardized structure for entries, which could randomly include metalinguistic comments on the etymology of some specific words, alongside lengthy sections concerning remedies, recipes, and the popularization of medical knowledge. Another key result highlighted how these works tended to present medical information (embedded in dictionary entries) that was much more personal and subjective (but certainly not less authoritative because of this) and that took more into consideration  the patient’s needs compared to other male-authored medical dictionaries, and especially so in entries about delicate themes such as miscarriage. 

Furthermore, funding enabled participation in specialized Digital Humanities training (such as the Oxford Digital Humanities Summer School) to build skills in OCR, TEI, and database construction, therefore laying the groundwork for a searchable online repository of women’s lexicography. This latest part of the project still needs to be further fully developed by identifying the right online platform which  could host this repository and by creating a system of entries that can be cross-referenced in order to allow a more direct and easier comparison.

Martina Guzzetti, Università degli Studi di Milano

Upcoming Conferences

Publication Information

The DSNA Newsletter is usually published twice a year, in the spring and fall. It is currently edited by Rachel Fletcher, the DSNA Communications Officer. Member news items can be sent to dsna.membernews@gmail.com; please include Member News in the subject line.

Our Executive Director is Lindsay Rose Russell.

Send correspondence re membership, etc. to
dsnaadmin@gmail.com
Dictionary Society of North America
Department of English, University of Illinois
608 S Wright St, Rm 208
Urbana IL 61801
USA

This issue: Vol. 50 No. 2 (2026)
Cumulative issue #102