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Revising The Dictionary of Canadianisms on

Historical Principles:
A Progress Report, 2006—(April) 2012

Stefan Dollinger, Laurel J. Brinton, and Margery Fee

Abstract
This paper takes stock of the accomplishments of the project to revise and
update the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (1967; DCHP-1), which
was first presented at the Dictionary Society of North America’s 2007 annual meeting
in Chicago. The five years since have seen a drastic shift in the dictionary market, and
as a result, the updated edition (DCHP-2) is entirely an online project. A milestone
towards the new edition—an online version of the first edition (DCHP-1 Online)—
was completed in 2011 will be released to be published on 28 January 2013. This
paper introduces the tools developed for the new edition—the Dictionary Editing
Tool (editing software) and the Bank of Canadian English (quotation file). It then
explains the selection criteria for digital data harvesting, which is the main source of
data for the new edition, describes the project’s connection to undergraduate and
graduate teaching and, most importantly, proposes a revised five-tiered classification
scheme for Canadianisms, which is the backbone of the new edition.

A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP-1; Avis et al.,

1967) was one of the first historical dictionaries of English produced outside of
the UK or the USA, and it served as a national icon for some time. It was the
flagship in the “Dictionary of Canadian English” series published by W.J. Gage
(now Nelson Education); this series, begun in 1962, produced Canadian-made
dictionaries and enjoyed great support by linguists and dialectologists, including
the Canadian Linguistic Association.

Following the publication of DCHP-1 in 1967, Raven I. McDavid, then

editor of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, stated confidently

Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 33 (2012), 164–178

 Revising The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles 165

that DCHP-1 “unlike most of the other historical dictionaries, is committed to

frequent and adequate revision” (McDavid 1970: 289). Flash forward 45 years, and
no revised version has yet seen the light of day; indeed, until some six years ago,
DCHP-1 had all but vanished from public and scholarly perception. But since 2006,
important steps have been taken to revive the dictionary and to bring it into the
digital age (see Dollinger 2006; Barber and Considine 2010). In this paper we will
contextualize the current project, located at the University of British Columbia at
Vancouver, starting with a brief history of DCHP-1, and then detail the progress
that has been made towards a revised dictionary, DCHP-2.

The DCHP project has two goals: the first is to produce an open-access
online version of DCHP-1. The second is to bring DCHP-1 up to date by adding
recent Canadianisms and filling major gaps in historical coverage. In July 2011 we
accomplished the first goal—DCHP-1 Online (Dollinger et al. 2011)—except for the
completion of the licensing agreement with Nelson Education, the copyright holder
of DCHP-1. Such agreement has been finalized in the summer of 2012 and was signed
on 1 October 2012. Contrary to early plans, ideas of a paper version were abandoned
in 2007, and DCHP-2 will be entirely an online product, accessible to all without charge.

A brief history of DCHP-1

I n the late 1940s Charles J. Lovell, while working as an assistant on

the Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles (DA), noticed
that many of the earliest attestations for headwords were from Canada.
Lovell subsequently addressed “certain lexicographic faults to which
scholars have too long been blind, not the least myopic being dictionary
editors themselves” (Lovell 1955a: 4). At the forefront of Lovell’s criticism of
the Dictionary of American English (DAE) and DA was the practice of “labelling
as Americanisms words that are our common [US and Canada] property,
and that may well have arisen in Canada” (Lovell 1955a: 4). Walter S. Avis
likewise found fault with both DAE and DA, suggesting that the “editor of the
DA might have been less chauvinistic in claiming paternity for the United
States” (Avis 1957/58: 148). The DCHP-1 was thus a profoundly Canadian
affair from the outset.1 Lovell and Avis, joined by Matthew H. Scargill and
the other editors of DCHP-1, became champions of what they saw as a
cause. In papers detailing his work plan for DCHP-1, Lovell (1955a, 1955b,
1956, 1958) was one of the first to dedicate himself to the “other” national

 1
A history of the making of DCHP-1 offers interesting perspectives on Canada-U.S.
relations and Canadian identity-formation in the post-war years, but this topic is beyond
the scope of this report (for more, see Dollinger In press: section 6).
166 Stefan Dollinger, Laurel J. Brinton, and Margery Fee

variety of North American English and aimed “to dispel any notion that the
Canadian English vocabulary is extremely limited” (Lovell 1955b: 6).
In 1957 the Canadian Linguistic Association began to coordinate
the production of three types of Canadian English dictionaries: Canadian
English dictionaries for schools (the Gage series, published between 1962
and 1967, now Collins Gage Canadian), “a historical dictionary of the English
language in Canada,” and “a dictionary of Canadianisms, which was to serve
as a pilot project for the larger historical dictionary” (Scargill 1967: vi). The
complete historical dictionary was never undertaken, but the dictionary of
“Canadianisms” proved more manageable. Lovell was appointed editor by
W. J. Gage in 1958, and after Lovell’s untimely death in 1960, the publishing
house, which acted as one of the prime commercial agents for the study
of Canadian English, purchased his impressive citation collection from the
estate and formed an editorial board. Headed by Avis as Editor-in-Chief
and Scargill as Director of the newly founded Lexicographical Centre for
Canadian English at the University of Victoria, the editorial board saw DCHP-
1 to a swift completion, with the bulk of the work done in about four years
(1963–67). A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles was published
in 1967, three years earlier than planned, coinciding with Canada’s
Centennial celebration. Its news coverage was enormously positive, one
commentator even terming it “[p]erhaps the most significant contribution
to Canadian letters in the past 300 years” (Dresser 1968).2
Data collection continued at both the Lexicographical Centre and at
various locations across the country, most productively at the Royal Military
College by Walter S. Avis. Avis’s death in 1979 was a big setback to the DCHP
project and the study of Canadian English, but data collection continued
throughout most of the 1980s (until Scargill’s death) at the Lexicographical
Centre at the University of Victoria. The DCHP lay dormant until the
Canadian “dictionary publishing war” broke out in the late 1990s, when
Oxford University Press and Nelson began to compete with Gage in the
Canadian English dictionary market (see Dollinger In press: section 6). At
the 2005 “Canadian English in the Global Context” Conference in Toronto,
T. K. Pratt convened the panel “Towards a second edition of A Dictionary
of Canadianisms on Historical Principles” (see Barber and Considine 2010),
where he and David Friend from Nelson Ltd. suggested a revision. In March
2006 Stefan Dollinger was invited to become Editor-in-Chief of DCHP-2.

 2
DCHP-1 has subsequently been complemented by two important regional dictionaries
of Canadian English, the Dictionary of Newfoundland English (Story et al. 1982, 1990), with its
impressive coverage of traditional dialects, and the much more compact Dictionary of Prince
Edward Island English (Pratt 1988).
 Revising The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles 167

Later that year, with Dollinger’s postdoctoral fellowship at the University

of British Columbia, the project became affiliated with UBC, and Laurel
Brinton and Margery Fee were invited to become Associate Editors.

Digitization and data collection

The first tasks of the new team were to secure funding—which proved
challenging and required “making a virtue [parsimonious spending] out of
necessity [shortage of proper funds]” (Dollinger 2010a). The next task was
the digitization of extant materials and the collection of new evidence.
Digitization. The print edition of DCHP-1 was scanned for
character recognition in 2006 by the University of British Columbia
Archives (Christopher Hives and Leslie Field), and manually proofread
by undergraduate students and the editorial team in a custom-made
online environment, between May 2010 and May 2011. The proofreading
involved about 1900 hours, excluding programming time. Figure 1 shows
an example of the new DCHP-1 Online, the word inukshuk, with one of
the line drawings from the original dictionary.

Figure 1
SAMPLE ENTRY FOR DCHP-1 ONLINE FOR THE WORD INUKSHUK
168 Stefan Dollinger, Laurel J. Brinton, and Margery Fee

DCHP-1 Online is now ready for users, and will be made publicly
accessible in January 2013. The software for the display of the online
edition (Dictionary Editing Tool, or DET) was used for proofreading, and
will also be used for editing the second edition (see Dollinger 2010b for a
fuller description). The software was initially developed in collaboration
with UBC’s Computer Science program (and its base component came
free of charge); the project programmers are graduates of the class that
began working on the project as part of their coursework.
Collection of new evidence. The main data collection phase for
the DCHP-2 occurred between February 2007 and July 2010. Around
7000 citations containing new potential headwords have been added,
based on lists from existing Canadian dictionaries and an occasional
reading program that added suspected Canadianisms. We have collected
about 36,000 new citations for around 7,000 headwords, primarily from
digital databases, including Canadian Newsstand, The Globe and Mail, Early
Canadiana Online, the Toronto Star, and LexisNexis Academic (on the use of
such sources, see Brinton In press; see Dollinger 2010a: 106–107). Data
were entered into the Bank of Canadian English (BCE) online.
See Figure 2 for a sample citation in the BCE for the word blue box.

Figure 2
SAMPLE CITATION IN THE BCE FOR THE WORD BLUE BOX
 Revising The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles 169

The BCE now consists of all the citations from DCHP-1 (about 30,000
for around 10,000 headwords) and the update citations for DCHP-2. We
have also integrated 2,800 citations from Walter S. Avis’s legacy files and 600
from Helen MacDonald’s legacy files in collaboration with Janice McAlpine,
former Director of the Strathy Language Unit. As of 12 July 2012, the Bank
includes 69,994 citations supporting 17,435 headwords. Headwords are
supported by an average of four citations each, dating from 1505 to 2012, and
the citations comprise about 2.4 million running words. The extensive legacy
files of DCHP-1—about 85,000 citations (Dollinger 2006: section 3.1)—still
await integration into the BCE. Not all of these citations are equally useful for
historical lexicography, as many were rejected by the DCHP-1 editors; the post-
1967 terms collected for the second edition are the most valuable.3
Attestations for particular headwords vary in number and in regional
and historical range. Some headwords scarcely deserve the name without
further evidence, as they are supported only by a single citation collected
as part of the team’s general reading in Canadiana. They are in the BCE as
headwords that require further study. Others are extensively documented.
For instance, Canuck is attested for a variety of meanings, from the early
pejorative meaning, ‘French Canadian’ (Dollinger 2006: 4.2.2), to its
present informal sense ‘Canadian’ (173 citations, 1849–2011). Some other
examples with wide temporal scope include muskeg ‘bog’ (57 citations, 1775–
2012), wendigo ‘cannibalistic monster’ from various Algonquian languages
(7 citations, 1863–1963), chuck ‘water’ from Chinook Jargon, a west coast
trade language (9 citations, 1830-2010), lake boat (21 citations, 1837–2007),
and gem jar ‘canning jar’ (24 citations, 1893–2009).
Our citation extraction scheme for digital sources can be explained
briefly. In the interest of ensuring good temporal coverage, words dating
from before World War II were searched for at intervals of 25 years, and
more recent ones at intervals of 10 years. For example, reading week ‘spring
break at university’ was first attested in 1969; thus citations were sought for
around the years 1969, 1979, 1989, 1999, and 2009. Regional coverage is
ensured by looking for citations from each of Canada’s 10 provinces and
3 territories. In theory, for this headword the search could produce 65
citations (five decades multiplied by 13). However, we found 12 citations,
one each from British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Quebec
and Yukon, and six from Ontario (Canada’s most populous and historically
most important English-speaking province). Searches are documented in

 3
Keyboarding the slips would be prohibitively expensive; using graphic scans of the
slips, with a software application, the “Paper Slip Tool” has been explored instead (see
Dollinger 2010b: 252–253).
170 Stefan Dollinger, Laurel J. Brinton, and Margery Fee

the “Search Documentation Tool” (a tab in BCE, see “SDT” in Figure 2) so

that future searches will not duplicate earlier search attempts.
With other linguistic applications in mind, we have collected more
data than required for a dictionary update. First, we selected longer citations
than normal. Average citation length for the BCE is around 200 characters
(or 35 words), as compared to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED): OED-1,
68 characters; OED-2, 74 characters; OED-3, 86 characters (figures based on
Sheidlower 2011: 198). For the purposes of DCHP-2, most newer citation
contexts will need to be shortened to the customary length in our online
environment (“Citation Clipping Tool”). Second, as described above, we
aimed for good regional and temporal coverage. Because of the settlement
history of Canada, but mostly as a result of the nature of the major Canadian
digitized databases, our historical coverage is best for Ontario, Alberta, and
British Columbia. Third, we included more regional data than needed for
the DCHP-2, which, as a national dictionary, can add only a limited array of
regionalisms without skewing its coverage. They can, however, remain in the
BCE for linguistic study, such as of historical morphosyntax (e.g. Dollinger
2010c; Brinton, Dollinger and Fee 2012).
The current limitations of the BCE are, obviously, its reliance on
newspaper and book citations and a relative dearth of material prior to 1800.
Although the (exclusive) use of newspaper data for lexicographic work has
been criticized (see e.g. Atkins and Rundell 2008: 62), it can be argued that
the newspaper databases now available provide an extensive temporal range
and, by including both large national papers and smaller local ones, provide a
variety of subjects, styles, and registers as well as regional variation (see Brinton
In press). Figure 3 shows the spread of citations in the BCE at present:

Figure 3
NUMBERS OF CITATIONS PER 20-YEAR PERIOD IN THE BANK OF CANADIAN ENG-
LISH (100-YEAR PERIODS, 1500–1800)
 Revising The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles 171

The 18th century in toto is represented by 2,000 citations or about

50,000 words of full text. From 1800 to 1920 each twenty-year period is
covered by 2,000 citations, a number that begins to rise after that date
to about 14,000 citations for the period between 1980 and 1999. Despite
these limitations, what we now have in the BCE is the best historical
database of Canadian English to date.

Principles of Selection for DCHP-2

Using digital sources, we have made our definition of

Canadianism both broader and more specific than Avis’s definition
in DCHP-1. Avis described a Canadianism as “a word, expression
or meaning which is native to Canada or which is distinctively
characteristic of Canadian usage though not necessarily exclusive
to Canada” (Avis 1967, xiii). We have divided Canadianisms into
five types:
1 Forms originating in Canada (neologisms), earliest attestations
in Canada, or form innovated in Canada, e.g. loonie ‘dollar
coin’, tuque ‘knitted cap’, ghost car ‘unmarked police car’, side
bacon ‘Canadian bacon’, emerg ‘hospital emergency room.’
2 Forms or meanings preserved in Canada that have fallen into
(relative) disuse in other varieties (or that were not adopted
elsewhere), e.g. chesterfield ‘couch, sofa’, eavestrough ‘roof
gutter’, including retentions of British terms that never gained
wide currency in the United States, e.g. soother ‘pacifier’,
serviette ‘napkin’, riding ‘voting district’.
3 Forms that underwent semantic change in Canada, e.g.,
Generation X ‘late ‘80s disoriented adults,’ homo ‘full fat milk’,
all-dressed ‘food (such as hamburger or pizza) with all the
optional garnishes’, blue box ‘blue plastic bin for recyclables’.
4 “Culturally” significant terms, e.g. grade 1, 2, 3 (vs. 1st, 2nd, 3rd
grade), French immersion, treaty rights, francophone, Zamboni ‘ice
resurfacing machine’.
5 Highly frequent forms (not first attested in Canada, not
having undergone semantic change, not necessarily culturally
significant), such as washroom, Chinook (wind), credit union
‘savings-and-loan’, residence ‘university dormitory’, impaired
‘drunk’ (in the context of driving).

The words in types 1 to 3 are justified as Canadianisms by their distinctive

histories in Canada. The definition of “cultural significance” (type 4) is
172 Stefan Dollinger, Laurel J. Brinton, and Margery Fee

kept deliberately fuzzy to allow for the inclusion of terms which are of
greater significance to Canadians than to those of other nationalities. For
instance, many Canadians fervently believe that we and we alone use the
discourse marker “eh”. While Avis (1972) argues against this, and excluded
the term from DCHP-1, newer research attests to its identity function (Gold
and Tremblay 2006) and distinctive usage patterns (Columbus 2010) in
Canada. Other national historical dictionaries have chosen similar fuzzy
categories, and include “the English used by or accessible to the majority of
Australians” (Ramson et al. 1989, viii) or words of “particular significance
for South Africans” (Silva et al. 1996, vii), and all of them take the non-
exclusionist approach reflected in type 4.
Finally, frequency, that is, number of attestations, will provide a
basis for inclusion. This fifth category was not anticipated in Dollinger and
Brinton (2008: 52), but is a logical consequence of our work with more
extensive data. To assess frequency we use digitized print sources from
various countries, complemented by internet domain searches, which are
normalized to ensure comparability (see Brinton In press).
To prove a word is a Canadianism requires cross-checking with
other varieties of English, particularly American and British. In the
introduction to the first edition, Avis (1967) pointed out the difficulties
of distinguishing an Americanism from a Canadianism. As a word
attested on one side of the border may well be quickly antedated on the
other side, Avis recommended the use of “North Americanism” for some
terms, although this label was not used in DCHP-1 (see Dollinger and
Schneidemesser 2011).
In the second edition, each new term will be classified as one of
the five types with a rationale given for our choice. The classification
allows for the inclusion of North American terms that we have good
reason to believe originated in Canada, such as make the grade ‘come up
to the standard’ or skid road ‘wooden road used in logging’ (Pratt 2004).
Distinctive regional forms found both north and south of the border,
e.g. geoduck ‘type of clam harvested on Pacific coast’ are included; in
DCHP-1 these were marked with a dagger symbol indicating their
“numerous extension in Canada” or because they “lend themselves
freely to the formation of new compounds” (Avis 1967: xii). Including
such words will help reveal patterns of lexical dissemination in the North
American context (Dollinger and Schneidemesser 2011: 130–131). This
typology will not only allow us to inform the reader of different types of
Canadianisms and thus facilitate academic debate, but it will also help to
characterize the Canadian English lexicon, and, in principle, compare
it with other lexicons. For instance, 57% of Canadianisms (sample of
 Revising The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles 173

fascicles J-L) have been identified as Type 1: Origin, 18% as Type 2:

Preservation, and 18% as Type 3: Semantic change, leaving only a small
minority as culturally salient terms (Dollinger 2012:1868: table 119.3).

Towards DCHP-2

Of the approximately 7,000 headwords that have been entered into

the BCE since 2006, only a fraction will be accepted as Canadianisms for
the second edition. Dollinger and Brinton (2008: 49) predicted that a 50%
increase in size was possible, based on a case study of the letter G; however,
time and funding constraints will limit DCHP-2 to approximately 700 new
headwords, or 7% of DCHP-1. We have selected these 700 words based on
our assessment of their status in Canada as terms in wide general use. These
new terms have been identified by comparing synchronic dictionaries of
Canadian English, such as the Gage Canadian (De Wolf et al. 1997), the
ITP Nelson (Friend et al. 1997) and the Canadian Oxford Dictionary (Barber
2004). Older terms missed by DCHP-1 but of importance to Canadian
history and culture have also been included.
Student assistants are currently researching non-Canadian data
sources that help establish the type of Canadianism, if any, each word
belongs to. This process involves comparing the frequencies of the
word in important non-Canadian databases, such as US and non-US
newspaper sources in LexisNexis Academic, in British newspapers, such as
the (London) Times newspaper database, and the relative frequencies of
the word in online corpora of US and British English, as well as a study of
the comparative (normalized) frequency of occurrence in the top-level
domains of the internet.
As this work is progressing, the editors are beginning to draft new
entries, using the Dictionary Editing Tool (DET). Figure 4 shows the
editing window for the entry advanced green. In addition to the standard
dictionary elements—part of speech, etymology, regional usage labels,
general and specific usage labels, variant spellings, pronunciation,
multiple meanings, and cross-references—the type of Canadianism will
be noted with a commentary). In DCHP-1, the “dagger” designation
marked terms that were not Canadianisms, but that were used to explain
Canadianisms or combined to form Canadianisms (Avis 1967: xiii). This
designation is replaced in DCHP-2 by the 5-part classification scheme.4
 4
Note that the dagger box appears in the DET (Figure 4) because the proofreading
of DCHP-1 Online required it. The fist note [Edit fist note] is retained as it provides an
opportunity to discuss complex or contested aspects of the word’s history (Avis et al. 1967,
xix).
174 Stefan Dollinger, Laurel J. Brinton, and Margery Fee

Citations from the BCE (shown on the right) are dragged into the shaded
box in the middle and edited, if necessary.
Figure 5 shows the “view mode” of the draft entry for advanced
green. It shows the Type of Canadianism, Type 5: Frequency, based on our
assessment of the Canadian and non-Canadian data. Further rationale
is given in the comment field: very rarely used outside of Canada, which
may be supplemented with frequency counts, e.g. from normalized
internet domain searches or newspaper counts. As the earliest Canadian
citation for advanced green is from 1960, and the earliest US citation only
from 1966, advanced green might qualify as a Type 1: Origin classification.
However, our assessment and confidence in the data makes us opt for
the more conservative and more defensible choice, Type 5: Frequency.
The definitions are kept fairly concise, generally not longer than
one sentence. Clicking on the book icon will open the bibliographic
information in the right-hand column, while clicking on the screen icon

Figure 4
EDITING WINDOW FOR THE ENTRY ADVANCED GREEN IN THE DET
 Revising The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles 175

will call up the source website, if available. A new feature in DCHP-2

links to research literature and dictionaries that reference the term.
In the Canadian context, the absence of a term in American or British
dictionaries is at times also indicative of its status as a Canadianism. These
features are currently being programmed and thus do not yet appear in
Figures 4 and 5.

Figure 5
DRAFT ENTRY FOR ADVANCED GREEN IN THE “VIEW MODE” OF THE DET

Sponsors, Budget and Time Line

Since 2005, funding has come from many sources: University of

Vienna International Office, Canadian Embassy in Austria, University of
Vienna—Dean of Arts, Nelson Education, two Standard Research Grants
from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2006,
2010), four grants from UBC’s Faculty of Arts to support undergraduate
research training (2008-), funds to supplement undergraduate salaries
from UBC and Canada Summer Jobs (2007, 2008), the UBC Canadian
Studies Program, the UBC Department of English (2008-) and the 2007
Urdang Prize of the DSNA. Initiation sponsors of seed monies included the
University of Vienna International Office (2006), the University of Vienna
176 Stefan Dollinger, Laurel J. Brinton, and Margery Fee

Dean of Arts (2006), the Canadian Embassy in Vienna (2005-07), Nelson

Canada Education (2006-07), the Strathy Language Unit (2008-09) and
UBC Archives (2006). Legal support came from UBC Counsel—Kimberley
Beck (2011-12). The overall budget available to us from 2005 to date has
been modest, around $100,000 (CAD). The proofreading of DCHP-1 cost
$27,000, with most of the work done by undergraduate students. In the
process, 27 undergraduate and 5 graduate students have been trained
to search for attestations and to proofread, and nine classes (around 360
students) used the BCE to learn data extraction methods. We would like to
thank David Friend and Terry Pratt, both formerly of Nelson Education, for
instrumental support in the early stages. We expect to complete DCHP-2 by
December 2015.

References

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———. 1967. Introduction. In DCHP-1, xii–xv. Toronto: Gage.
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———. 2010a. A new historical dictionary of Canadian English as a linguistic database
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