Speaker
Description
Online dictionaries have many advantages over their physical counterparts. However, the ephemeral nature of web content means that they are often changed without notice and no ostensible record of what came before remains. This makes research on historical online dictionaries difficult and perhaps explains why, while the history of printed monolingual English learners’ dictionaries (MELDs) has been comprehensively explored, studies of online dictionaries have tended to take a cross-sectional rather than longitudinal view. This is not ideal since it means that a large period of MELD history is yet to be explored. Moreover, given recent predictions of the decline of MELDs, as we know them, in light of developments with AI chatbots and other digital tools, this gap is all the more significant. In an attempt to remedy this situation, this study applies Brügger’s (2018) framework for archived web research to explore the feasibility of using the web archive, the Wayback Machine, to trace the development of websites that give, or have given, access to ‘the big five’ MELDs. Some key challenges of using archived web material to conduct lexicographic research are discussed along with suggestions for potential solutions.
