The American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel: Background information when reading Says Who?

The American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel

This article relates to Says Who?

Anne Curzan, author of Says Who?, has some compelling bona fides when it comes to remarking upon English grammar and usage. Not only is she a linguistics professor, she was also for many years a member of the illustrious (and somewhat mysterious) American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language Usage Panel. If you, like me, own a copy of the American Heritage Dictionary in no small part because you enjoy the usage notes it includes, you will likely find Curzan's insights into the makeup and process of the Usage Panel fascinating.

The American Heritage Usage Panel was composed, most recently, of nearly 200 "scholars, creative writers, journalists, diplomats, and others in occupations requiring mastery of language." When the American Heritage Dictionary was launched in 1969, it was in part a reaction to the perceived permissiveness of Webster's Third New International Dictionary, published in 1961, which included entries for words based on their usage, without labeling them correct or incorrect. In response, editor William Morris relied on a panel of, at the time, 105 experts who were hand-selected for their relatively conservative approach to language usage.

The Usage Panel weighed in on any number of hot-button questions—from the comparative forms of "fun" ("funner," "funnest") to whether the "t" in "often" is silent or if the past tense of "sneak" is "snuck"—and their feedback was compiled to inform usage notes in subsequent editions of the dictionary. Apparently, in 1977 (according to a "Talk of the Town" piece in The New Yorker) the members of the Usage Panel met in person for a cocktail party at the St. Regis to hash out any number of thorny questions (including whether the word "collectible" was in bad taste). But in more recent years (much to Curzan's dismay) the panel's feedback was collected by means of an annual survey.

Certainly over time the Usage Panel became more diverse (out of its original 105 members, only 11 were women, and only 6 members were under age 50). In 2018, panelists included cartoonist Alison Bechdel, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, historian Annette Gordon-Reed, humorist David Sedaris, and poet Claudia Rankine. But that year was the last for this accomplished group, since the dictionary's publisher announced it was disbanding the Usage Panel, citing the decline in demand for print dictionaries. As Curzan's book points out, just tracing the ways in which the panel's advice evolved over the half-century of its existence vividly demonstrates the shifting nature of even the best-informed attitudes toward the English language.

The St. Regis New York hotel at Fifth Avenue and 55th Street in Manhattan, New York, seen in December 2022.
Photo by Epicgenius (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Filed under Cultural Curiosities

This article relates to Says Who?. It first ran in the April 17, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.