WORDS THAT DIED TWICE

Lexicography has long treated the disappearance of a word sense as a single, datable event: a form falls out of use, editors mark it "obsolete," and the entry closes. This article argues that obsolescence in dictionaries is rarely so tidy, and that many senses undergo a second, administrative death — what this article terms semantic reburial — when dictionaries are revised. A sense may survive for generations in a dormant, labeled state, cited but unused, before a later revision quietly removes, compresses, or relabels it, severing its last visible tie to the living record of the language. This second death is not linguistic but editorial: it results from decisions about space, citation currency, corpus evidence, and audience, rather than from any change in speech itself. Drawing on the editorial history of major historical dictionaries, particularly the Oxford English Dictionary, and on the theoretical literature on lexicographic obsolescence and diachronic semantics, this article develops a framework for distinguishing primary semantic death (loss of use in speech or writing) from secondary, editorial death (loss of representation in reference works). It proposes a typology of reburial practices — excision, subordination, relabeling, and silent merger — and examines the historiographical consequences of each. The article contends that dictionaries are not neutral archives of a language's past but active agents in determining which parts of that past remain visible, and that revision policy therefore deserves the same critical scrutiny historians of the book have long given to canon formation and textual editing. The discussion closes by considering what responsibilities, if any, lexicographers bear toward senses they choose to bury a second time, and what this means for corpus linguists and historians who rely on dictionaries as primary evidence of semantic change.