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Why do dictionaries play an important role in our lives when language matters come to the fore? Why are they treated as the ultimate sources of authority in such matters as various religious books are treated in other matters? People use dictionaries to settle arguments. But where does the authority of the dictionary come from? There are also various dictionaries and they do not give us the same information and answers about the language and the issues we seek to resolve. So which dictionary should we rely on and why? Dictionaries provide a kind of order and authority for our language—even if in some cases that order is little more than an alphabetical listing and the authority may be questioned—but are they really to be trusted?

Dictionaries give us information about words. The existence of dictionaries reinforces a strong belief many people have that a language is merely a collection of words. We learn a language by learning a collection of words. We learn a language by learning its words: how to pronounce them; how to put them together; what exactly they mean; how to spell them and so on. Furthermore, if a word is not in the dictionary we must assume that it is not in the language. This is the argument widely used with irregardless: it is not in certain dictionaries ao it is not in the language no matter how often we come across it in speech, possibly even use it ourselves. Moreover, if some dictionary-maker puts it in a dictionary, that inclusion is a mistake because irregardless is not a legitimate word because it is not in other dictionaries, a completely circular argument. The real issue here is that of deciding on the legitimacy of words. Who should decide which words are to go into dictionaries and what criteria should they use? Should a dictionary include that word from Mary Poppins, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? If yes, why, and, if no, why not?

Dictionaries usually try to give us an objective record of the language but there is sometimes disagreement about the concept of "objectivity" in matters to do with language. Dictionary-makers know the kinds of judgments they are called on to make. They know how many react to their efforts. Not all dictionaries are alike in the way they deal with words, particulary with words that proved to be contentious. Moreover, different people have different expectations of dictionaries. Language scholars, for example, have different expectations from members of the general public, even that part of the general public that is well informed on language matters. As we will see from what happened when Webster's Third was published in 1961, fierce controversy can erupt when the expectations that many influential people have of dictionaries are not met. One consequence is that the public for whom dictionaries are produced remains no wiser about either language matters in general or words in particular.

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Should a dictionary include that word from Mary Poppins, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? If yes, why, and, if no, why not?