Alogomachy - n. an argument about words - is brewing on the World Wide Web.
Houghton-Mifflin plans to publish the fourth edition of its American Heritage dictionary this month, the volume's first major overhaul in eight years. The new edition is full of changes sure to arouse lexicographers - color illustrations, notes on slang and a new appendix describing Semitic as well as Indo-European roots.
But the change by the publisher that has stirred the most excitement is happening outside the covers, as Houghton-Mifflin hustles to sell electronic versions of its dictionary for inclusion in other companies' software, Web sites and digital publications.
Houghton-Mifflin is not alone. Its major rivals - most notably Merriam-Webster and Microsoft Corp.'s year-old Encarta dictionary - are stepping up their digital dictionary efforts to tap an increasingly lucrative market, setting up a business contest that philologists say will also have consequences for the way Americans use English.
Electronic novels might be making headlines these days, but electronic dictionaries are making money. At Houghton-Mifflin, licensing of digital dictionaries is expected to account for more than $1 million in profit this year, more than 10 percent of the earnings from the company's trade and reference division, according to Wendy Strothman, the division's publisher.
Stifled for years by low margins and flat sales, dictionary publishers are salivating over digital sales and licensing as a new source of revenue growth, promoting flashy new features such as audible pronunciations. But word scholars worry that the new pressures of the online market might end up favoring well-connected or well-positioned dictionaries - some sniffingly note Microsoft's Encarta - over more authoritative lexicons.
Many lexicographers first saw the Internet as a terrific new tool, especially because it made possible electronic texts of nearly infinite length. That impulse inspired the Oxford University Press to revise its 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary for the first time since its completion in 1928.
A new online version of the OED is available to subscribers for fees starting at $550 a year. Researchers are posting the revisions and additions online in stages, and they expect to finish the alphabet in about 40 volumes around 2010. Oxford University Press has not decided whether it will publish a new printed version, too, said Jesse Sheidlower, its American editor.
