It’s just after Easter, and the editorial team in Oxford University Press Canada’s dictionary department is embarking on a two-week reading blitz. They’ve just sent the printer the first edition of The Oxford Canadian Dictionary of Current English – the latest of many spinoffs from the flagship title, The Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Now, they’re taking a break from proofing hundreds of pages of tiny type and shifting focus to their ongoing hunt for new Canadian words.

Hunched over the Toronto Sun sports section, green highlighter at the ready, associate editor Heather Fitzgerald flashes a determined smile. “I’m taking one for the team,” she says. While catching up on the latest basketball scores and scanning through ads for weight-loss supplements isn’t her favourite pastime, she says it’s important for lexicographers to have a broad knowledge of the language they study. “So I tend to break it up for myself – if I read the Sun all morning, then maybe I get to read The Fiddlehead in the afternoon,” she says.

Early spring tends to be a quiet time for the Canadian Oxford team, as their schedule usually has them sending their latest project to the printer by mid-March so that it’s ready in time for BookExpo Canada. But while many assume that lexicography is a slow process that requires patience above all else, the typical schedule is actually fast-paced and demanding. “You have to learn to work really fast – speed and accuracy are the most important qualities,” says editor-in-chief Katherine Barber. “If you can’t do it, you can’t cut it as a lexicographer, because there is a huge amount of work to be done and not an infinite amount of time to do it.”

Lexicographer Robert Pontisso learned that lesson quickly when he joined the team in 1993, in time to pitch in on the A section for the first edition of The Canadian Oxford Dictionary. “As fascinating as it was to work on the first edition of the dictionary, it was gruelling – it seemed like it would never end,” he says. “But we’re still reaping the benefits of that work today, because a lot of the rest of the work we do is derivative.” After the first edition of the COD wrapped (it was published in 1998), Pontisso moved on to editing the first edition of the Canadian Oxford Thesaurus and then The Canadian Oxford Spelling Dictionary.

Like his colleagues – besides Barber and Fitzgerald, the department also includes associate editor Tom Howell – Pontisso came to lexicography indirectly; there are, after all, few university lexicography programs. As an English major at the University of Toronto, he says, he was always fascinated with idioms and how people use words or phrases to mean different things. “I was always trying to figure out ways to get my friends to repeat things they’d said without being too obvious about it,” he says. But he could not have been too subtle about it, either, because when a friend saw the Oxford posting on a U of T job board, he directed Pontisso to it, saying, “That’s you!”

Fitzgerald also took a circuitous path to the field. She had worked at a variety of writing jobs, from book reviewing to ad copywriting, before Barber, who knew her from a choir they both sing with, suggested she apply for an Oxford opening. After a series of what Fitzgerald remembers as grueling tests in parsing sentences and analyzing parts of speech, she was hired about two and a half years ago. While still a part-timer, she worked on a range of small projects, such as updating the biographical entries in The Canadian Oxford Dictionary and researching words for the TVOntario Spelling Bee.

Since moving up to full-time work last fall, Fitzgerald has gained a new appreciation for the tight schedule. She sees the current two-week reading blitz as a nice change of pace after a solid month spent proofing The Oxford Canadian Dictionary of Current English. Using the Sun sports section, Fitzgerald demonstrates how she searches for new words. She reads each page from top to bottom, including each story and each ad (which makes the classified section a real slog, she says). So far, she’s highlighted “vasculite” and “naturalceuticals,” both in dubious-looking health ads. More promising, she finds an unusual spelling of “mocumentary,” which lacks the generally expected “k.” Depending on how prevalent the spelling turns out to be, it eventually may be noted in their reference books as an alternate spelling; or it may just be a mistake.

It’s all part of the process of updating the Oxford database of Canadian words, which will help with their next big project: the second edition of the Paperback Oxford Canadian Dictionary. As Barber explains it, there are strict criteria governing how new words – or new senses or usages of existing words – get added to the dictionary. For starters, lexicographers must have at least five years’ worth of references for a word, in order to make sure it isn’t ephemera. In most cases, lexicographers also look for at least 15 different references for the word to ensure that it’s used widely enough to be included. Barber stresses that choosing to include or exclude words is not a judgment call on her part: the Oxford philosophy has always been to describe the current language of the times, not to prescribe how it is used. Which is why love ’em or hate ’em terms such as “bling-bling” and “fashionista” appear in its pages.

With two proper editions of The Canadian Oxford Dictionary now published (the second appeared last year), containing about 2,200 Canadian words and senses, most of the new Canadianisms now come from the reading blitzes. As Fitzgerald explains, all highlighted words from newspapers, books, magazines, or even restaurant menus get entered into the “incomings” database, along with their respective parts of speech, source citations, and one or more quotations to illustrate their meaning. This database is shared with other Oxford teams around the world, and because each quotation for each word is tagged by the country office that entered it, the system helps identify Canadian words. For example, Barber says no one realized that “cheezies” was a Canadian coinage until someone was going through the database one day and noticed that all references for the snack originated from Canada.

The shared database is also the method by which Canadian words filter back to The Oxford English Dictionary. Since the first Canadian edition was published in 1998, Barber says it has been a delight to see the number of Canadian words and Canadian quotation sources that pop up in their parent publication. “We’re really having an impact on the other dictionaries,” she says. (A quick database search shows, for example, that Q&Q is quoted five times in the OED, for words including “pestilence,” “plain cooking” and “opsomaniac.”)

Though one might assume the bulk of the lexicographers’ time is spent researching new words and phrases, much of what they do these days has more to do with condensing and eliminating words and definitions, such as they did when compiling The Oxford Canadian Dictionary of Current English. This volume, which will retail for about $10 when released as a mass-market paperback this month, is a general dictionary, so the task was to further streamline the contents of the Paperback Canadian Oxford Dictionary, which contains 75% of the material in The Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Once the decision was made to remove particularly archaic or specialized words, as well as all examples and parts of speech, it was up to the staff to wade through the rest of the definitions to condense each as much as possible.

While the discovery of new words is the most rewarding work, Barber admits that many of the team’s editorial tasks can become arduous. For example, it took about two months simply to proof the new Oxford Canadian Dictionary of Current English, one of the group’s smaller books. Tedium also set in when the team spent four weeks doing little else but inserting wordbreak dots – which show readers how to hyphenate each word properly – into each headword for the second edition of The Canadian Oxford Dictionary. “It can be hard on the eye and the brain,” says Barber. “But I’m very proud of my staff. They do a lot of work, and it’s amazing the miracles they regularly produce.”

Associate editor Tom Howell plays a big role in keeping morale up during the more tedious tasks. During the proofing of the second edition of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, he says, “nerdy word games got us through.” If, for example, they were proofing a section of words beginning with imp-, they would try to devise alternate meanings for the words based on how an imp would use them. Or, every time he or Pontisso came across a Russian town they hadn’t heard of, they would do some quick research on it to break up the pace. “So, it started to turn the day into sort of a travel through Russia,” says Howell. While the games may sound silly, they’re a testament to the camaraderie of the team, he adds.

Howell wasn’t looking for quirky games when he joined OUP two and a half years ago. After working in a variety of jobs in the publishing industry, he was simply looking for something more interesting. “I was appalled at how grown-up I was expected to be at an office job, and went looking for something more fun.” He found it at Oxford Canada. “Everyone there is very well-informed and interesting, and the level of banter in the office is very good. In fact, I think that’s what I was looking for when I was following an unrealistic, romantic idea of what the publishing world would be – an environment where everyone’s chatting and where there’s interesting conversation and it doesn’t feel like an office.”

Once the reading blitz is done, it will be back to business for the Oxford team, with a busy year ahead. Fitzgerald and Howell will work on compiling the second edition of the Paperback Canadian Oxford Dictionary, while Pontisso is set to begin work on a smaller version of The Canadian Oxford Dictionary that will include lexicographical entries but eliminate the encyclopedic entries found in the parent dictionary.

Barber’s schedule will also be packed. A well-known speaker across the country, she is already booked solid until March 2006. This year, she will also pen the Canadian Oxford team’s first non-dictionary title: a collection of her etymological pieces from over the years, including material from various articles as well as her gig as CBC Toronto’s “Word Lady.” Tentatively set for a spring 2006 release, the book will include a range of word histories linked by theme, such as the “six words you didn’t know derived from ‘pig,’” which Barber initially wrote for Toronto’s Royal Agricultural Winter Fair. “I really liked doing the research for those,” she says, “because it’s something you can’t go into with a dictionary, and it’s interesting the ties you can make between words when you look at them thematically instead of alphabetically.”