This chapter provides an overview of the process of conceiving, researching, editing, and publishing dictionaries, both synchronic (or commercial) and historical. Discussed methods and tools for making dictionaries range from traditional hand-copying of citations from print books and paper-and-pencil editing to sophisticated electronic technologies like databases, corpora, concordances, and networked editing software. The chapter shows how editorial conception of the needs and sophistication of the end user largely determines the dictionary’s length and headword list as well as the format, defining style, and level of detail in entries. The chapter goes on to examine how the pressures of commercial publishing, with its looming deadlines and pressing need to recoup investment by profits from sales, affect the scope of dictionaries and the amount of time editors can devote to a project, and how these pressures differ from those affecting longer-trajectory, typically grant-funded historical dictionaries. Assessing the consequent challenges for managing and motivating people working in these two very different situations, what may be the most important factor in a project’s success, concludes the survey of dictionary editing.

A final discussion emphasizes the unique experience of each person as they continue into later life. We recognize how music may make available new ways to understand the existential challenges of aging, and to direct us in the enterprise of self-actualization and wellness. As Rollo May notes, in the process of aging we seek to bring together and integrate our understandings of all the earlier times of our life and find new ways of adapting to and enjoying life. We point out entrapments of aging (e.g., the belief that aging is all about decline) and how to overcome them. Moreover, recognizing our search for meaning in later life, we note the hope of self-actualizing transformation, and suggest that music may help older adults look at the world in a fresh, new way and to make positive adjustments to life’s challenges. As a universal phenomenon, we note that music breaks down barriers that separate us from others, allows us to see that which is common to all of us, and to celebrate living.

This chapter examines the process by which modern lexicographers enter words into their dictionaries. Before we can discuss how a word gets into an English dictionary, we must first understand the purpose of the modern English dictionary and contrast that purpose with the purpose of historical English dictionaries. A general understanding of early English dictionaries, including the audiences they were written for, establishes the historical methods early lexicographers used when entering words into their dictionaries. We then examine the techniques Samuel Johnson used in writing his 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language, as these methods become the basis for the modern English dictionary. There is then an in-depth discussion of the criteria lexicographers use when choosing words for entry, as well as an overview of the process itself and how the Internet has affected these centuries-old methods.