Job title: Lexicographer

Companies that hire them: Dictionary publishers such as Oxford, Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Random House, and Encarta.

How to find out about openings: Contact the publishers and join the Dictionary Society of North America to find out about job postings.

How much you can earn: Assistants start at around $30,000 a year, while senior editors can hit the low six figures; freelancers are paid either by the project or hourly at a rate of $25 to $45.
 
Useful skills: Knowledge of grammar and computational linguistics, dexterity with search engines, open-mindedness, a curiosity about language, and a superb eye for detail.

Number of jobs in the U.S.: 200 full-time positions and about the same number of freelance jobs.

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Erin McKean’s newest favorite words are chrematistic, erinaceous, and locavore. The first means “engaged in the acquisition of wealth”; the second refers to a hedgehog and shares the first four letters with her own name; and the last indicates one who eats locally grown food.

Until recently, lexicographers like McKean, a chief consulting editor for American Dictionaries at Oxford, used their eyes as their main tool, recording word usage from everything they read on thousands of little slips of paper. “The old model of lexicography was a dude in a comfortable chair thinking about words,” says McKean. The lexicographer then filled the dictionary with the fruit of his contemplation. A new breed of lexicographers, however, prefers the computer over the armchair.

“We’re all geeks now,” she says. Computer searches helped persuade her to add the words taikonaut (a Chinese astronaut); edamame (Japanese soybeans boiled in their pods and served as an appetizer); and the verb usage of spoon (to lie closely together with someone) to her dictionaries in recent years. Although she still uses her eyes and ears, McKean more often relies on sophisticated online aggregations of text known as corpora to identify new words and meanings. The corpora are gathered from thousands of different sources, including such disparate places as transcripts from CNN, Cory Doctorow novels, the Journal of Experimental Botany, Chinese medicine instructional sites, Dissent magazine, blog sites from Gaza and Kabul, and professional wrestling discussion boards.

These online databases reveal how often different words are used in conjunction with others so that she can refine her definitions and make comments on usage: For example, pink things are more likely to be “fluffy,” while green things have a tendency to be “fuzzy.”

“I’d rather get paid to suss out how words are being used, not to find them in the first place,” she says. Although there are still kinks to work out with computer corpora and not everyone in the industry uses them to the same extent, McKean says she fully embraces their use.

When McKean was eight, she came across an article in the Wall Street Journal about how the supplement to The Oxford English Dictionary had fallen 21 years behind deadline because the language was just changing too rapidly. She decided right then that she wanted to be a dictionary maker when she grew up, an epiphany that led her to first study linguistics at the University of Chicago and later to become an intern, assistant, and finally an editorial manager of children’s dictionaries at publisher Thorndike-Barnhart. She eventually landed at Oxford University Press in 2000, where she became editor in chief of the second edition of The New Oxford American Dictionary.

Calling herself a “dictionary evangelist,” McKean is on a mission to bring the dictionary into the 21st century. “We had this handy book-shape container to pour data about words into, but that doesn’t reflect the shape of the language,” McKean says. She thinks dictionaries could be better accessed with an online, cell-phone-size device with a search engine, regular updates, no space constraints, and dialogue among users and lexicographers.

“I want people to demand more from their dictionaries,” she says.