The near-death of the English monolingual dictionary market in this century has implications for the viability of lexicography as a livelihood. What are lexicographers to do now with their specialized skill set if no one wants to pay them for writing definitions?

Our speaker, Orin Hargraves, proposes an analogy with the development of photography and its effect on pictorial art. Happily, that development did not result in the end of pictorial art, nor the starving of pictorial artists. But it did change painting forever and irrevocably. Similarly with lexicographers: they have in effect been liberated from the confines of the print dictionary. Their horizons are considerably expanded with regard to what can be done with word and language reference on the internet.

There are many innovative language reference tools online and surely many others yet to be developed. Hargraves discusses the challenges of maintaining the viability of lexicography in today’s greatly changed dictionary marketplace, when AI chatbots seem as capable as any dictionary or lexicographer of answering a human user’s questions about the meaning of words.

Orin Hargraves describes himself as a lexicographer, instructor, and language researcher for numerous US, UK, and European research organizations, law firms, publishers, broadcasters, universities, startups, and other concerns. His chief area of concentration is the English language, with expert knowledge of semantics, grammar, and dialectal differences between British and American.

The projects he has been involved in have resulted in the publication of reference books, websites, ontologies, lexical databases, and in the production of iteratively refined inputs to natural language processing (NLP) systems. He also researches and develops expert testimony about the meaning and use of words and phrases.

Hargraves taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as a lecturer in Semantics. He has worked as a researcher in the Center for Computational Language and Education Research (CLEAR). He also worked extensively with VerbNet, PropBank, OntoNotes, and their connections to FrameNet and WordNet.