Learner’s dictionaries across time: trying to motivate the different treatment of bad langauge words

In an age in which lexicography is such a diffused business, managed by important institutions whose teams of lexicographers are constantly in contact with others and whose expertise is in continuous evolution, it is rather hard to fully comprehend the stark differences in the way bad language words are treated in the five monumental English learner’s dictionaries. It is our belief that a diachronic analysis might help to shed light upon this. In compiling a dictionary, the factors that among other things influence lexicographical choices are the editors’ theoretical plans, the readership’s needs, and the temporal setting. Taking into consideration theseparameters, we will examine the prefaces of all the editions of the five learner’s dictionaries, across a sixty-two year period, starting from the first dictionary published in 1948 through to the last in 2010 in order to gain a little more insight into why CALD and MEDAL take a much more descriptive lexicographical approach, while OALD, LDOCE, and COBUILD a more prescriptive one.