Questions tagged [lexicography]

Some dictionaries source attestation and try to go for the earliest quotes they can find. How do they find them? Without electronic indexing this must have been impossibly difficult. The reason I'm asking is that many answers on Stack Exchange often…

A "basic form" may seldom appear in a highly inflected languages, and languages in the world are different from each other, by which we cannot simply apply the convention of IE languages on an "exotic" language to define the "basic form" of a word…

For example, the OED has the following for the word "ask" Forms: α. Old English ascian ... β. Old English achsian ... γ. Middle English aische ... Do (α, β, γ) mean anything special, or are they simply equivalent to enumerating a list with (a, b,…

I'd like to know the difference between the way lexicographists wrote dictionaries in the past, and the way they could procede now, in our modern times. Note: To compare, I'm talking about lexicographists who work alone on a project, not a team.…