Not an atoz, but somewhat atozzical nonetheless

Your Humble Blogger happened to pick up a book called A Guidebook to Learning: for a lifelong pursuit of wisdom, by Mortimer Adler, in which he complains about alphabetiasis, that is, the overreliance on alphabetical rather than conceptual organization. There are some interesting things, and it’s possible I will decide to finish the book, but my reaction to the first handful of pages was mostly perplexity. Had this man never heard of hypertext? It’s true that lots of things are still alphabetized, but surely you can’t talk about arrangement and categorization without talking about hyperlinks.

It turns out that the book was published in 1986, so in all probability Mr. Adler had not, in fact, heard of hypertext, although the concept was not new, and on reflection it seems odd that somebody would have written a whole book about categorization in the mid-eighties without talking to somebody who was working on hypertext or something like it. Still, it would be a couple of years before I heard of hypertext, and I assume the same is true of most people. Less than twenty years, then, for it to have upended everything so completely.

For instance, Mr. Adler complains that our great universities print their catalogs in alphabetical order, rather than in an order that more genuinely reflects and guides its readers and their search for education. I’m pretty sure that even at the time, university catalogs were not primarily alphabetical, although it’s possible that one of the prominent levels of hierarchy was. That is, first the division into schools: the Medical School’s courses kept separate from those of the Law School, the Business School, the undergraduate College, the Art School and any other such division. Then, possibly, a division within the larger schools, so that the undergraduate courses would be divided into the Sciences, the Humanities, and the Social Sciences. This division would not be alphabetical, of course. With, say, the Humanities, though, the departments might well be listed alphabetically, with Art and Art History before Music before Religion, etc, etc. Within the department, though, I believe most universities arranged courses by number, and those numbers are assigned with an eye to the things Mr. Adler is on about, although there are other administrative things that come into play, as well.

Now, of course, although the Universities do print some catalogues as marketing tools, people look at their courses largely on-line, and can search by various things (instructor, time, department, number of credits, price of texts) that may have something to do with what Mr. Adler was on about and may not. We expect our data to be in tables, we expect those tables to be sortable, and to be able to filter or search them. Order is not fixed, so alphabetiasis is not even relevant.

But something did occur to me, and this is connected with this alphabet business and the recent release of the 6th edition Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. The SOED has about half a million definitions. Which seems like a lot. And it takes up two volumes and weighs 5.8 squintillion pounds, or 13 brazillion kilograms. And it’s a cool thing, and all, but here’s my idea: would it be useful for a OUP or a MW or an American Heritage to put out a set of dictionaries that would be separated by frequency of use? Let’s say that the first volume would have, say, twenty-five thousand words. That’s not a lot; it’s actually a bit smaller than a “compact” or “desk” or “pocket” dictionary. On the other hand, it would have 25,000 words. That would be volume one; volume two would have 100,000 words. That’s about half-way between a “pocket” and a “collegiate”. But it would not have any of the words that were in volume one. Volume 3 would be another 100,000 or so, bringing the three-volume set up to “collegiate” level; again, it would consist of words not in the first two books. Volume 4, then would be a big fellow, 250,000 words, bringing you up to the level of the SOED or an Unabridged. And, if you want, there could be a Volume 5, covering all the really obscure stuff that is in the OED but not the SOED.

The point is that if you are looking something up, you can probably guess what volume it’s in. If you are right, and again, I’m assuming you will be most of the time, it will be quicker to look it up, because there will be substantially fewer words; V3 would be half the size of a collegiate, for instance, and V4 half the size of an unabridged. Even if you guessed wrong, it might still be nearly as quick. And, of course, having fewer words, the typeface of the early volumes could be bigger, which would be nice since really, you’re going to be using V2 most of the time anyway, aren’t you?

Actually, I’m curious whether that’s true. I have no idea. OUP has the Corpus, which means that it would be trivially easy, it seems to me, to sort words by frequency of (written) use; they don’t display that information on-line, so I can’t test it.

Is this a good idea? Probably not. For one thing, I hardly ever look things up in a print dictionary anymore, anyway, and that’s likely true for a lot of other people. Still, there’s a sense in which I’d like to own the SOED, but I would not want to use it to look up how to spell pabulum. I grew up in a house with a small paperback dictionary, a collegiate dictionary and an unabridged dictionary. All the words from the first were in the second; all the words from the first and second were in the third. Maybe that is the easiest way to do it, but I wonder.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,