[词典讨论] 文橋出版社 通用英語辭典（1998）就是Larousse English Dictionary

Sixty seconds in... Lexicography
Faye Carney, managing editor at Bloomsbury Publishing, talks to Miles Brignall
Sat 4 Sep 1999 11.18 BST
The problem with this job is that it completely takes over your life. Every time you overhear an unusual conversation, you start wondering why the person used that particular word or construction. On a train last week the conductor announced that we were now arriving "into" Newcastle, instead of a more conventional "at". This is what it's like.

Put simply, my job is to write definitions of words you might look up in a dictionary. It becomes more complicated when you have to decide whether a word is in or out. You only have to look at how fast a word such as email can enter common usage - the skill is deciding whether it's here to stay. It's why overheard conversations are so interesting.

In the past writing a dictionary could take 20 years; today, it's all computerised and much faster. At the push of a button I can bring up 100,000 examples of a word's use from around the world: articles in newspapers, modern fiction and even examples of spoken text.

We then analyse how a word's usage may have changed and come up with a more appropriate definition. Some words are easy and will be dealt with in minutes. Words with a number of meanings like "take" could easily take four weeks.

A lot of how you define a word will depend on the type of dictionary you are creating. A dictionary that includes Australian English will look very different to an American equivalent. If we are looking to include examples of, say, Black American English then we might bring in a specialist.

We are usually working on four or five projects at any one time in teams of six, although this can rise to 30 as a project nears completion. A lot of the fun is the other people who tend to do this job. One of the downsides is the project management. Because of the huge expenses involved, it's critical not to run over time. Using the latest technology and with everyone on email, we've just completed the Encarta World English Dictionary in five years which is our fastest yet.

At the heart of the job is a deep understanding of how languages function, with a particular emphasis on grammar. I studied modern languages at Edinburgh and was lucky enough to be taught by an inspirational professor. Like so many people I fell into the business by accident. I actually went for a job in general publishing and was asked whether I had thought about dictionaries. I took the tests and have never looked back.