This is bound to be controversial. From Bob Katter’s anti-gay marriage political campaign to the forced resignation of Matt Glover, the Lilydale Baptist minister who expressed his support for same-sex marriage on the Christians4Equality website, this topic has proven highly contentious.

Dictionary-makers in parts of the world that have already legalised same-sex unions have warned of the unpleasant treatment they received from anti-gay marriage protesters disguised as language police. Last year, the Executive Editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, Steve Kleinedler, was attacked on the website of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) for updating the definition of marriage in the 2009 American Heritage Dictionary. It took two years for his critics to notice that the definition had been extended to read ‘and in some jurisdictions between two people of the same sex’. The NOM campaign personally vilified Kleinedler, commenting on his own sexuality and encouraging its followers, ‘Next time you go shopping [for a dictionary] make sure it has the word marriage defined correctly as one man/one woman otherwise do not buy.’

Ever since dictionaries began, the business of definitions has been political or dangerous, or both. In 1607, John Cowell (1554–1611) wrote a law dictionary called The Interpreter, and was sentenced to death for his definitions of the words King, Parliament, and Prerogative. His dictionary is now seen as one of the best of its day, but in seventeenth-century England royal power was as controversial as gay marriage is in twenty-first-century Australia. The House of Commons objected to the wording of Cowell’s definition of King – ‘he is above the Law by his absolute power’ – while the definition of Parliament stated that ‘either the king is above the Parlement, that is the positive lawes of his kingdome, or els that he is not an absolute king’. The definition of Prerogative indicated that the King ‘hath a prerogative above the law’. The dictionaries were burnt and eventually Cowell was pardoned, but he was forced to resign his Cambridge professorship, and died four months later. The controversy did not go away. Four decades later, there was a civil war and James’s son Charles I was executed for trying to rule without Parliament and exercise his ‘prerogative’.

Getting complaints about definitions goes with the territory of being a lexicographer. Usually it is just that people do not like the way the definition reflects the changing use of a word. Very occasionally, the lexicographer gets it plain wrong in a controversial context. This was the case in 1951 when the fourth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary was published with Pakistan defined as ‘A separate Moslem State in India, Moslem autonomy; (from 1947) the independent Moslem Dominion in India’. The entry should not have described the country of Pakistan as part of India. When India had gained its independence from Britain in 1947, the country was partitioned. Pakistan became a separate country for the Muslim majority population of what had been British India. Getting the meaning of this word wrong was a political landmine.

The definition lay unnoticed for eight years until suddenly the Pakistani government called for a ban on the dictionary and confiscated it from all public schools, colleges, and offices. Police raided the Oxford University Press offices in Karachi, and seized the final copy of the dictionary that lay in the drawer of a typist. OUP apologised, issued a correction slip to be inserted in all copies of the dictionary, and the Pakistan government lifted the ban in November 1959.

As a lexicographer, the closest I have come to danger was being picketed by the British Potato Council (BPC) outside the offices of the Oxford English Dictionary in 2005. The BPC wanted us to remove couch potato from the dictionary because, in the words of Kathryn Race, spokesperson for the BPC, ‘We are trying to get rid of the image that potatoes are bad for you.’ The BPC wanted the OED entry replaced with its own invented term ‘couch slouch’.

1. It is only a matter of time before Australian dictionaries will need to reflect the changing uses of words related to same-sex unions. However contentious that is to some, we lexicographers will know that we are only doing what our predecessors have always done. We will be standing in a long tradition of breaking tradition to reflect the dynamism of language.