This chapter deals with the Canadian Dictionary War of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when three excellent desk dictionaries were competing on the small Canadian market. Linguistically, in the 1990s it looked as though Canadian English would be doomed in light of competition from American English. At the same time, however, the global diversification of English and ensuing linguistic awareness had created a market for national dictionaries of English that seemed too attractive to foreign publishers to pass up, triggering a new kind of dictionary war in the Canadian context. A genuine public relations and marketing battle ensued between Oxford University Press, the newcomer, and Gage Ltd, the mainstay in Canada. In the end, unlike the American dictionary war of the mid-1800s between Webster and Worcester, which Webster won, the Canadian Dictionary War saw only losers, as all three dictionaries folded by 2008, raising the bigger question of how smaller nations might enable and support adequate language reference sources. The chapter offers a behind-the-scenes look at what makes and breaks a general desk dictionary and defines, linguistically, the notion of Standard Canadian English.

This chapter focusses on Avis rescuing the faltering dictionary project after Lovell's unexpected death in 1960, after only two years at the helm of the project. It explores the intellectual background of Avis at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where he met his future wife Faith Hutchison, who was one of the most educated women in all of Canada at the time. It traces Avis' academic socialization to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was trained and surrounded by the best linguists and dialectologists of their day. Avis, just like Lovell, died relatively young of a heart attack, and there are a number of further parallels and differences between the two men that are highlighted. Parallels between Avis and Lovell on the one hand and Noah Webster and Henry L. Mencken, the American spokespeople for linguistic autonomy, round off the chapter.