David B. Guralnik, Lexicographer, 1921–2000

1985 SPECIAL CITATION FOR DISTINGUISHED SERVICE TO THE ARTS

During his 37-year tenure as editor in chief of Webster's New World dictionaries, David Guralnik enjoyed the rare distinction of fathering royalty. The college edition of the New World line—a dictionary Guralnik helped to create, and whose ongoing revisions he oversaw for nearly four decades—became the standard reference of the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and many other newspapers throughout the United States. Indeed, the dictionary was so highly regarded that over the years it earned a respectful sobriquet: “the Rex of Lex.”

Under Guralnik's editorial leadership, Webster's New World dictionaries were among the first to include colloquial usages, idioms and pronunciations unique to the U.S. Ultimately, these distinctly American dictionaries achieved such widespread acceptance and popularity that by the year 2000 more than 80 million people were using the college edition alone. It could be said of Guralnik, therefore, that few other individuals have had so profound an influence on the quotidian language of the nation. And all this from a man who, when he started working as a lexicographer, did not even own a dictionary.

The day after he graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in English from Adelbert College (now Case Western Reserve University) in 1941, Guralnik was hired by Cleveland's World Publishing Company to work as a summer editorial assistant on a simple revision of one of the firm's inexpensive dictionaries. Although he planned to return to the university's graduate English program in the fall to earn a master's degree, Guralnik was persuaded to stay at World and continue working on the revision. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he returned to World Publishing, where he was asked to finish the job of creating the company's first college edition of the dictionary. Pursuing his M.A. even as he worked full time, he was named dictionary editor in 1948.

Guralnik did not accept the widely held conviction that his job as a lexicographer required him to entomb a given era's English in a protective block of amber. He believed in the mutability of language, and he saw his role as a chronicler of the changes that occurred naturally in language over time—he would describe, not prescribe. Thus, if the World staff and its legion of outside “readers” noted enough citations of a particular new word, usage, meaning or spelling in contemporary journalism, literature or popular culture, the new material would be included in the next revisions of World's dictionaries. In addition, World publications always included what are generally considered to be the most detailed etymologies used in any American dictionary.

Guralnik retired in December 1985 as vice president and dictionary editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, Inc., which had purchased World Publishing in 1980. Even in retirement he continued to explore language, producing a weekly segment on Yiddish for The Jewish Scene, a cultural program on Cleveland radio.

Guralnik was a longtime Fellow of the Dictionary Society of North America and served as its president for many years. He remained editor of Webster's New World dictionaries until his death at age 79, in May 2000. But his judgment, taste and wisdom will continue to have an impact on the written and spoken English of Americans for generations to come.

—Mark Gottlieb

We were determined . . . to avoid at all costs creating the impression (first perpetrated by Johnson and continued by most of his successors) that we are authoritarians laying down the law about usage. We would rather play the role of a guide, pointing out what the accepted usage actually is.

Corpus delicti [L., lit., body of the crime], 1. the facts constituting or proving a crime: the corpus delecti in a murder case is not the body of the victim, but the fact that death has occurred and that it is the result of murder. 2. loosely, the body of the victim in a murder case.

You will note that even though we carefully explain the legal meaning of the term, we recognize the popular “erroneous” use in our second sense.