by Communications Officer Comment Closed

Newsletter Spring 2026

Table of Contents

Member News

Lynne Murphy has been awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant to study “Defining the Undefinable: The Lexicography of Functional Vocabulary.” She’ll be undertaking that study from August 2026 for two years.

Kory Stamper‘s long-awaited book on color defining in Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, and Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, was released on March 31, 2026. True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–from Azure to Zinc Pink is available from booksellers in the US and UK now.

Jeremy Withers is pleased to announce the publication in June of his book Birding English: The History of a Language in 50 Birds (University of Iowa Press). DSNA members might recall that Jeremy presented at our most recent conference in Buffalo on the birds in Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language. His book also discusses the birds found in other famous dictionaries such as Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionarie, Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, the Oxford English Dictionary, Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, and more.

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 X/Twitter. 

In Memoriam

Ian Lancashire (1942–2025)

My University of Toronto colleague Professor Emeritus Ian Lancashire (1942–2025) died unexpectedly of COVID-related complications on April 3, 2025. Within the DSNA community, many of us must now think of him above all in connection with Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME), a searchable (until July 2024) open-access text and database collection of editions of historical dictionaries, glossaries, and other lexical works. Ian’s creation of this collection fundamentally changed what lexicographical research could be, especially in its scope and methodological reach. 

At and for the University of Toronto, Ian was also a pioneer in what I still think of as humanities computing. In 1985, he founded the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH), with funding from IBM Canada; it quickly became the Centre for Computing in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CHASS). Ian’s innovations and expertise in corpus-based lexicological methods and historical lexicography ultimately grew out of his expertise in Early Modern drama, theatre history, and editing and bibliographical scholarship more generally. He was also a poet: indeed, if you have ever taught poetry courses you may well be familiar with another of his projects, Representative Poetry Online.

LEME’s predecessor, the Early Modern Dictionaries Database (EMEDD), was Ian’s first major contribution to digital historical lexicography, though it was only one of his many computer-assisted editorial and research projects. He edited and made searchable sixteen monolingual and multilingual dictionaries, along with several “specialized lexicons” (such as herbals) and Richard Mulcaster’s spelling list. Apparently, it amused Ian and his research team when I searched EMEDD from my office for words like pox, to see whether contagious diseases were more typically blamed on the French or Spanish. 

EMEDD expanded into LEME, which eventually contained over 300 works. These included not only dictionaries but also glossaries, grammars, spelling lists, herbals, essays, and other lexically-relevant texts, all edited and searchable, and ranging in date from 1475 to 1755. I recall that Ian’s inclusion of Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary was particularly expensive, but at a time when the digitized versions on ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online) had unreliable OCR (optical character recognition), and when the Birmingham Samuel Johnson DVD became unusable on my PC because of changes to Windows, it was groundbreaking to be able to search Johnson at all, let alone to compare him with eighteenth-century predecessors like Nathan Bailey and Thomas Dyche. (LEME’s lexicons went beyond Early Modern English!) 

LEME also made it possible to compare different dictionary traditions: to assess, for example, the indebtedness of the English “hard word” tradition to bilingual and multilingual dictionaries, or the relation of English spelling lists to general dictionaries, as well as to track lexical change in progress. My undergraduate students found it particularly compelling to interpret evidence of language contact in colonial and commercial contexts.

Ian’s broad command of lexical and lexicographical historiography is also evident in his general editorship of the five-volume Ashgate Critical Essays on Early English Lexicographers (2012). The series ranges from Old English through the eighteenth century, showing how generations of lexicographers –  from anonymous monastic glossators, medieval schoolmasters through Renaissance humanists, slang collectors, technical authors and encyclopedists – shaped and documented the growth of English vocabulary. The volume editors, Christine Franzen, Roderick McConchie, John Considine, and Anne McDermott, brought together influential essays (many otherwise difficult to access) that illuminate major historical and theoretical developments, as well as the intellectual and practical traditions that shaped them. The series reflects Ian’s commitment to making early lexicographic culture both visible and usable for other scholars.

In addition to the CCH/CHASS infrastructure, Ian developed computational tools that underpinned EMEDD and LEME and that advanced humanities, literary, and lexicographical analysis more broadly. His creation of TACT, an MS-DOS-based text analysis tool, helped establish methods for handling lexical evidence, in and beyond dictionaries. TACT was highly regarded and influential: my own web-based research about it not only reminds me how widely it was used for analyzing literary and other texts but also testifies to its ongoing influence on later online tools (e.g. Voyant). 

Ian’s technical innovations also fuelled broader interdisciplinary projects. His own publications ranged from historical lexicography and corpus linguistics to digital humanities and cognitive stylistics. Working with collaborators in computer science and medicine, Ian explored lexical evidence for dementia by identifying authors like Agatha Christie who suffered from it and tracking patterns of vocabulary loss in their works. This method was named by the New York Times among 2009’s 10 most innovative ideas, and Ian went on to explore the neuroscientific evidence of creativity in his 2010 book Forgetful Muses (2010). His initiatives won him numerous research grants –  from SSHRC, Canada’s federal humanities funding agency, and from other sources. He led a collaboration among several Canadian universities on the first major grant ever awarded to the humanities by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), which provides grants for research infrastructure.

Ian enabled many others to make transformative use of his resources and his mentorship. As one of those beneficiaries, and as a former long-term Associate Director of our MA program, I remain particularly aware of how important his research opportunities were for the dedicated students he employed as researchers and motivated as co-authors. One of his final RA students – now pursuing fully-funded doctoral work at Oxford – ultimately delivered their co-authored paper on her own: “Language Policy in The Tempest and Jamestown.” That presentation highlights Ian’s ever-evolving scholarship and his long role as a mentor to Canadian humanities students. His family’s collectively-authored obituary of Ian mentions his book in progress on the making of English 1475–1625. The challenges involved in bringing this work to publication posthumously underscore both Ian’s extensive knowledge and original approach, as well as the generosity and expertise of others. 

As I have reflected on Ian’s importance to me and the DSNA , I have consulted the recollections of others – those of his widow (and my colleague and friend) Anne, as well as the obituaries written by his family, our department, and the Canadian digital humanities community. Those of us who still think of digital humanities as humanities computing are probably particularly aware of the well-documented problems of digital longevity, arising from technological obsolescence and increasing security concerns. 

Ian’s significance for the DSNA community certainly includes resources like LEME, on which many members have relied. His digitized edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) now forms the core of the University of Central Florida’s Johnson’s Dictionary Online, to which he donated it. While the LEME lexicons remain available online, in both chronological and authorial order, the University of Toronto Library that hosts the project made the website static-only in 2024 for security reasons, and it is therefore currently not searchable. An active search for a new home for a dynamic/searchable LEME is underway. I hope that experienced and generous colleagues at other institutions will be able to host and revive the searchable version. 

The understandable difficulties in maintaining a site like LEME only underscore the depth of Ian’s vision and the extraordinary energy with which he transformed the materials, methods, and possibilities of historical English lexicography.

Carol Percy

Ken Litkowski (1942–2023)

Ken Litowski, a white man with lush white hair parted at the left, brown eyes, and sharp eyebrows, wears a short-sleeved blue check button up and leans on his left arm propped on a table. The background is warm oranges and browns.
Ken Litkowski: photo courtesy of Orin Hargraves

I discovered that Ken Litkowski had died in 2023 only weeks ago. A researcher in China wrote to me asking how me might access two databases that Ken had developed because they had disappeared from their published web addresses. This led me, after some Googling, to Ken’s death notice. He passed very quietly from the world and this saddened me, in light of his influence in natural language processing (NLP) and in my career. Hence this tribute.

Ken was a mathematician by training but in every other way, an autodidact: in computer science, web technology, computational linguistics, and lexicography. He joined the Dictionary Society in 1989. In the spring of 2000 he placed an advertisement in the DSNA newsletter for DIMAP, a dictionary DMS that he was developing. He invited freelance lexicographers to apply to help him in his efforts. At the time I lived in Maryland and by good fortune, only an hour away from where Ken lived.

I had no influence on the development of DIMAP, but soon after meeting Ken I began to help him in what can rightly be called his life’s work: The Preposition Project. Ken was obsessed with unlocking the secrets of prepositions—their meaning, behavior, and chameleonic polysemy—in order to make them more tractable computationally. This was an area that few researchers had focused on previously; prepositions were often regarded as “stop words,” to be ignored in computational processing.

The task was straightforward: map the 80,000 instances of preposition tokens in FrameNet to a sense inventory of prepositions, in order to create a gold standard dataset of prepositional patterns and meanings. In addition, we developed a data-driven ontology of prepositions and classified, as well as we could, their syntactic behaviors and thematic roles.

 We used the sense inventory in NODE (New Oxford Dictionary of English), which identified (at the time) 373 prepositions, divided into about 850 senses. We tackled it one preposition at a time. In a few instances I came across prepositional uses that had no corresponding NODE sense. In these cases, I created a new sense definition and added it as a numbered sense or subsense in the hybrid TPP/NODE inventory. 

This work took more than three years and resulted in the culmination of the database (TPP) and the paper that accompanies it (The Preposition Project, 2005). The project had all the hallmarks of a good lexicographical undertaking: ample opportunities for agonizing over dilemmas, the necessity for close attention to detail and nuance, and monotonous repetition. Ken and I met infrequently in person but spent many hours on the phone, talking about prepositions. He was far more tireless in the pursuit than I was.

Ken had begun participating in the problem of computational word sense disambiguation (WSD) earlier than this. Along with many researchers in computational linguistics, he participated in Senseval (Sense Evaluation), an annual workshop of researchers who participated in shared tasks that were intended to make headway in the thorny problem of computational WSD. Senseval began in 1998; Ken started participating in 2001, when his papers began to appear in the proceedings.

Starting in 2007, Senseval had changed its name to Semeval (Semantic Evaluation) and Ken helped to organize two tasks that year: prepositional WSD, for which task participants used the data we had developed, and another task, “Coarse-grained English all words task.” This task was developed specifically to address a problem with WordNet, the most widely used NLP resource at the time. WordNet was deemed far too “fine-grained” to be useful computationally; in more lexicographically familiar terms, WordNet is too splitty. Computers work better with lumpier sense inventories.

For the “all words” task, Ken collaborated with Roberto Navigli of the University of Rome (La Sapienza). The lexicographic component of the task was smaller and from my POV, a lot more fun and technicolored, compared to the preposition project. Using interfaces that Roberto designed, my job was to read and interpret marked polysemous words (mostly nouns and verbs) that were drawn from publicly available text sources (e.g., Wikipedia and the Wall Street Journal). To each word in use I assigned what I thought was the closest defined sense in WordNet and in NODE. The purpose was to create a robust mapping from WordNet (splitty but built to be used by computers) and NODE (built to be used by humans, but helpfully lumpier than WordNet). This work resulted in a paper that is still cited today and regarded as foundational in addressing the granularity problem in computational WSD (SemEval-2007 Task 07: Coarse-Grained English All-Words Task).

DSNA sponsored my teaching of the lexicography course at the 2011 LSA Institute, which was held in Boulder at CU. The professor in charge of the institute, whether by coincidence, serendipity, or providence, was Martha Palmer. Martha was then already a leading light in computational linguistics and had also been involved with Senseval/Semeval since the beginning. She was well acquainted with both Ken and Roberto, and by the good fortune of my being able to collaborate with them, she knew my name; if only from having seen it on two papers. At the end of the institute at a faculty party, I mentioned to Martha that I was thinking of returning to Colorado to spend more time with my aging mother. She said, “Come to CU. I’ll fix you up with something.” I came, and she did.

Ken soon returned to his passionate focus, prepositions. Using data from TPP and from corpora that had become available online, he developed PDEP, the Pattern Dictionary of English Prepositions. As the name suggests, it was inspired by Patrick Hanks’ Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs (PDEV), and informed by Hanks’ theoretical approach as laid out in his 2013 book, Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations. PDEP drew on much of the data in TPP (mainly based on FrameNet) but also drew prepositional examples from the British National Corpus and the Oxford English Corpus. Ken presented a full description of PDEP at the annual conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2014 (Pattern Dictionary of English Prepositions)

By this time, other researchers in NLP had become interested in prepositions, notably Nathan Schneider (now at Georgetown) and Vivek Srikumar (University of Utah). These two in particular took up the torch that Ken had lit in the computational study of prepositions, and they continue that work today, albeit in the light of the LLM revolution.

In the mid-2010s, Ken massaged PDEP so that it would be usable for queries in SketchEngine. It lives there now as the English Preposition Corpus and is unique in being able to offer Word Sketches of  prepositions, among the hundreds of corpora available there.

In April of 2023 I invited Ken to attend the DSNA conference in Boulder. He replied simply that much as he would like to, he was not able to travel. Then, unbeknownst to me, he died three months later. He was still hammering away at prepositions till near the end of his life. In 2022 he published BERTological Lexicography for Prepositions, taking advantage of the then recently developed word-embedding models used in NLP, of which BERT is one. 

Ken had no institutional affiliation—he was essentially a one-man preposition band. I expect that when his online accounts expired, no one was around to renew them, hence the disappearance of his data from its previous homes. Fortunately his work has found its way into many other corners of the cloud and it is still widely cited by preposition detectives. I owe Ken a lot: he was a catalyst for what has been, in my mind, a storybook ending to my career in lexicography, a career that might well have ended with a whimper years earlier for want of dictionaries to work on.

Orin Hargraves

Frances McSparran

Frances McSparran, Chief Editor of the Middle English Compendium, responsible for the digitization of the Middle English Dictionary, passed away January 10, 2026. Obituary — Frances McSparran | The University Record

Javier Ruano-García (1981–2026)

It is with profound sadness that I inform the DSNA members of the passing of Javier Ruano-García, a scholar, a colleague and a friend, on Tuesday 17 March, 2026, aged 45. Having long had a cardiac condition, he recently had to undergo a major operation, from which he did not recover. 

Javier Ruano-García was Associate Professor of the History of the English Language in the Department of English Philology at the University of Salamanca. He was widely known for his research in the field of historical language variation, with a special focus on regional dialects of the early and late modern English periods. A significant part of his research was related to the Salamanca Corpus, a major project aimed at documenting dialect variation in English.

As an expert on lexical variation in the history of English, dialect lexicography and manuscript studies, Javier contributed three different papers to Dictionaries: in 2014 he analyzed William Nicolson’s Glossarium Brigantinum of 1677; two years later he focussed on 18th-century Norfolk words in a British Library MS; more recently, in 2020, he explored the contribution of Angelina Parker to the making of the English Dialect Dictionary.

Those who knew Javier will remember him as a dedicated and thoughtful scholar, a wonderful colleague, and a kind person. For some of my colleagues in Milan and myself, Javier was also a very dear and caring friend. A few of us had the opportunity to teach on his courses in Salamanca, and he came to Milan – a city he loved so much – several times to teach on our courses. We were excited about seeing him in Milan once again in mid June, for the ICEHL conference we are hosting, where he had planned to co-convene a panel on late modern English(es). Javier will be sorely missed, but it will be comforting to speak about him as a scholar and a friend with the many colleagues from all over the world who knew and were fond of him. It is up to us to carry forward to spirit of intellectual curiosity, generosity, and warmth that Javier embodied.

Giovanni Iamartino

DSNA26 to be held at UC Davis

Mark your calendars for the 26th Biennial Meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America, which will be held at the University of California, Davis from June 16–19, 2027. It will begin with an optional workshop on practical lexicography and a welcome reception on Wednesday, June 16, and end with the biennial business meeting of the Society the afternoon of Saturday, June 19.

The theme of the meeting is: In the age of AI, who creates and owns meaning?

A dictionary is the quintessential collaborative enterprise: the speech community, the lexicographers, the editors, the publishers, the developers, the designers – dictionary projects are inherently the work of many hands. The era when dictionary-making was chiefly the realm of publishing houses is largely past, but the collaborative nature of the work is not. What’s shifting is the nature of how meaning is captured and communicated, with speech communities organizing language in ways that resist both traditional authority (the voice of the expert) and the entrenchment of past meanings that AI reinforces.

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 by DSNA 24 (the lexicography of Indigenous languages) and DSNA 25 (AI and the future of lexicography). 

Be on the lookout for the call for papers on such topics as:

  • The lexicography of North American languages
  • The use of AI in dictionary making
  • The relevance of historical lexicography in the current context
  • Arbitration of meaning in speech communities
  • Tools for collaborative lexical projects

As always, presentations on any aspect of dictionaries, lexicography, and lexicology, historical to contemporary are welcome.

Symposium Report: The Whole World in a Book

Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington, February 20–21, 2026

Madeline Kripke (1943–2020) was dubbed the “Doyenne of Dictionaries” (per the New York Times), and put the playful moniker “Lexicunt” on her business card. She amassed over 20,000 volumes in her Greenwich Village apartment (with more in various storage units); these were obtained by the Lilly Library at Indiana in Bloomington after Kripke’s death. This past February, the Lilly Library hosted a remarkable exhibition, The Whole World in a Book: Celebrating Madeline Kripke’s Dictionary Collection, along with a two-day symposium organized by Michael Adams.

The exhibition opened with a lively discussion between Adams and Stefan Fatsis, author of the recently published Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary, a book that mentions Kripke and her collection. The conversation covered Fatsis’ work embedded at Merriam-Webster, speculations on the future of dictionaries, and of course, Fatsis’ encounters with Kripke. At the reception afterwards, I spoke with an IU student who attended because his chance purchase of Unabridged had sparked an enthusiasm for dictionaries.  

Saturday’s symposium offered six talks, each approaching the Kripke collection and the broader world of dictionary collecting from a different angle. Jonathon Green, lexicographer of English slang, opened with reflections on his long relationship with Kripke (complex, at times contentious, but grounded in deep mutual respect) and on what her collection contributes to the field of lexicography. Jack Lynch’s talk demonstrated how collecting supplements the work of scholarly archives, pointing out that even an academic salary can support a meaningful collection. Although Johnson’s 1755 dictionary and Webster’s 1828 dictionary may cost tens of thousands of dollars, the byways of lexicographic history (rhyming dictionaries, children’s dictionaries, traveler’s dictionaries, regionalism dictionaries) remain surprisingly affordable, and a focused collection in any of these areas could establish someone as a genuine authority. 

Lindsay Rose Russell’s talk, “The Queer Art of Collecting,” prompted some of the day’s liveliest discussion. Drawing on queer theory, Russell addressed the place of sex-focused dictionaries in lexicographic scholarship. Russell declined to characterize Kripke’s sexual identity, which led participants to debate whether that decision was a necessary act of respect or a missed opportunity to support queer people who, one participant noted, “would be very inspired by Kripke.” Participants also discussed what proportion of Kripke’s collection focused on sexual themes. Although the Lilly librarians have catalogued an eye-popping variety of these texts, ranging from humorous mimeographs to salacious mass market paperbacks to sober medical dictionaries, too much of Kripke’s collection remains unboxed for consensus to be reached.

After lunch, Rob Rulon-Miller, Jr., of Rulon-Miller Books, shared career reminiscences, including stories about Kripke and other significant collectors. Highlights included witty letters from columnist and speechwriter William Safire (“Mr. Rulon Miller, your catalog 75 is a killer diller”) and Verbatim editor Laurence Urdang (strongly objecting to styrofoam packing peanuts). Afterwards, Elena Wicker, herself a collector of American military dictionaries, presented on the Military Dictionary Project that was born out of catastrophic miscommunication at Kasserine Pass in 1943 and has continued through numerous Department of Defense dictionaries. Military lexicographic work proceeds somewhat differently than civilian work; fewer citation slips, more surveys. Alluding to Peter Sokolowski’s observation that “Language follows rules but it doesn’t follow orders,” Wicker quipped that in military dictionaries, language follows orders but it doesn’t follow rules! The day concluded with Volker Harm’s charming account of Richard Wagner as a dictionary collector and reader, a reminder that the history of lexicography winds its way through the most unexpected lives.

Before and after these talks, participants browsed a display of highlights from Kripke’s collection that included dictionaries for specialized audiences, dictionaries on specialized topics (e.g., Star Wars), rare historic dictionaries, promotional materials, and correspondence between the Merriam brothers about purchasing the rights to Webster’s 1828 dictionary.

Kripke’s collection is vast enough to sustain an entire career of scholarly attention. Those who seek a glimpse of what they missed can start with Michael Adams’ ongoing blog series, “Unpacking the Kripke Collection” [https://blogs.libraries.indiana.edu/tag/kripke-collection/]. 

Beth Rapp Young

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
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This issue: Vol. 50 No. 1 (2026)
Cumulative issue #101