ABSTRACT
My objective in this book has been both to demonstrate that the English dictionary is a fundamentally ethnocentric work and to locate the sources of this ethnocentrism in the structures of the dictionary itself. Ethnocentrism in the dictionary is in part a matter of the way in which lexicographers conceptualise the idea of ‘a language’. The OED2’s definition of the word language, for example, reveals much about the ways in which it goes about its task of representing the English language to its users:
language … the whole body of words and of methods of combinations of words, used by a nation, people or race.
