What and why?

The first question to answer is, what is Lyre’s Dictionary?

Lyre’s Dictionary is a computer program that makes up new English words and writes dictionary entries defining them, by taking the parts and patterns that make up actual English words and recombining them. It also posts the words it makes to social media so that people can see them.

Lyre’s Dictionary is not the first bot made to write novel dictionary entries (I keep a list of all the ones I’m aware of here). But of all the ones I’ve seen, it’s the most particular about the forms of the words it creates. It represents an attempt not just to create and define words, but to create words that are etymologically plausible. That is, while they did not necessarily arise in the course of English history, we can consider them as possible outcomes of the same historical processes that did result in our English. They are built from the same roots, according to the same patterns (or as close as I can make them).

You can think of this as an exploration of the possibility space of English etymology — going beyond the lexicon that is and mapping the greater lexicon that could have been, by visiting random points.

The question that follows is, why do this?

One why is just that I love etymology. Lyre’s Dictionary came to be only because of my deep love for prying into the histories of the words we use every day, and maybe especially the weird ones that people hardly use at all.

And the more I’ve gotten to know words and the parts that make them up, the more questions come up like, why do we have the words ‘valid’ and ‘valor’, and ‘liquid’ and ‘liquor’, and yet we have ‘morbid’ but not ‘morbor’? If you can give someone a ‘come-hither’ look, can you give someone a ‘go-hence’ look too? Every new word-part learned becomes a new toy to play with.

So etymology is a game. And it’s a game with rules. Well, actual English may not always follow the rules, but to me the fun is in playing within them. It’s easy to put some syllables together and assign them a meaning, it’s more challenging to find the existing patterns and parts to combine to get the meaning you want.

So another why is just the system-pleasure in collecting the pieces, learning the rules, and trying to teach a computer to play with them. And the challenge of doing so — it’s not always possible or straightforward to draw a straight line that connects all the actual words from a certain root, or in a certain pattern-family. But over time new patterns reveal themselves the more you investigate.

And investigating these word-families and patterns has given me a reason to delve deep into dictionaries (a subscription to the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary has been an indispensible tool) and find all kinds of fun words I didn’t know about before: galactopote, cachexy, deliquescent, frangible. And this has been a great pleasure as well.

So because of all that, this is a project that I’ve really loved working on. And what I’ve made with it so far is far short of the ideas I’ve had for what it could be. I don’t know how many of those ideas will ever be realized – when I released the first version of Lyre’s Dictionary in 2018, I thought to myself that I could imagine spending the rest of my life working on it. In any case, I expect to continue returning to it for a long time.

– Robin, July 24 2022