Say It Directly

Suppose a word arrives. People start saying doomscroll, and after a year or two somebody at a dictionary has to decide whether to define it, and what the entry will say.

The first part of that job isn't writing. It's reading. A dictionary writer — a lexicographer — collects examples: newspaper sentences, radio transcripts, posts, captions under photographs. Not to count them exactly, but to watch how the word behaves. Is it a verb, a noun, or both? Does it take an object? Do people use it about themselves or about other people? One test matters more than the rest: does the writer stop and explain the word? If most writers still add a small explanation, the word isn't ready. A dictionary describes words that people already share, not words that people are still teaching each other.

Then comes the definition, and the definition is where the discipline lives. A good one usually has two parts: a general category, and whatever makes this thing different from everything else in that category. A chair is a seat, and that is the category; for one person, usually with a back, and that is the difference. Every extra clause costs the reader a second, and every missing clause lets a wrong meaning in.

The oldest test in the trade is substitution. Take the word out of a real sentence and put the definition in its place. If the sentence still makes sense, the definition holds. If the sentence turns strange, the definition is doing something the word does not do.

Context supplies the rest. That is what the example sentence is for: not decoration, but evidence. It shows the word standing next to the words it actually keeps company with.

None of this rewards cleverness. A definition is one of the few kinds of writing where the reader wants to be told directly, in the first six words, and where a beautiful phrase that delays the meaning is simply a mistake.