Sarah Ogilvie is Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics at the University of Oxford, where she is also Director of the Dictionary Lab, a research initiative applying digital tools and methods to the study of language and dictionaries. Author of Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary (Cambridge, 2012), she has taught linguistics at Stanford University, California, the University of Cambridge, and the Australian National University, Canberra, where she was Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre and Chief Editor of Oxford Dictionaries, Australia. She has also worked as an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, and spent two years working on dictionaries at Lab126, Amazon's innovation lab in Silicon Valley.
'Among the topics that crosscut the essays are the policy, purpose, and philosophy of various dictionaries, along with the evidence and technology that drive them and the economic factors that constrain them. But equally valuable, particularly for nonspecialists, will be the bits of dictionary lore that contributors bring to their work. Replete with useful illustrations, tables, and reproductions of dictionary entries, the work also provides a guide to further reading and a chronology of dictionaries and important events. This is a welcome addition to the literature on English language and linguistics. Highly Recommended.' E. L. Battistella, Choice