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1 results

  • Chapter 30 - Legal and Ethical Issues in Dictionary-Making

  • from Part V - The Business of Dictionaries
  • Edited by Edward Finegan, University of Southern California, Michael Adams, Indiana University, Bloomington
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of the Dictionary
    Published online:
    19 October 2024
    Print publication:
    31 October 2024, pp 630-648

  • Summary

    Dictionaries participate in the “real world,” which means they are subject to legal and ethical issues relevant across professional and commercial fields. Among the legal issues, dictionaries are intellectual products and are themselves intellectual property that draws on others’ intellectual property. Thus, dictionaries encounter copyright and trademark challenges: they incorporate material under copyright or trademark protection, and they have their own copyrights and trademarks to protect. Among ethical issues, recognition afforded those who make dictionaries figures prominently, as in the history of dictionaries, many of those involved in their making were abandoned to anonymity. Recently, intelligent dictionary readers have noticed cultural biases in dictionary entries, in the language used to define words, for instance, or labeling and other assertions of value embedded in dictionary structure. Some have boycotted dictionaries over such ethical lapses and dictionaries have responded, constructing a new ethical relationship between makers and readers of dictionaries.