New Book – A Polar Dictionary – Cold Words

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A polar dictionary: cold words. Bernadette Hince. CABI, UK, 2025. 472 pages, 24 B/W illustrations. Available in hardcover ISBN 9781486319459, and as an eBook.

[Released first in Australia and NZ as Cold words: a polar dictionary (CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne 2025)]
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Cover of A Polar Dictionary: Cold Words by Bernadette Hince

We explore our world in many ways, using a plethora of techniques. Scientists use stardust and 14C, for example, to uncover the history of ancient life on this planet. You may not have thought of using the words you use as tools for environmental or historical research, but they are. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words, language is “the archives of history.” A polar dictionary collects the distinctive English words of the Antarctic and Arctic to tell us about the history of the two coldest places on Earth.

A polar dictionary collects the distinctive English words of the Antarctic and Arctic to tell us about the history of the two coldest places on Earth.

So-called “historical dictionaries” such as this one do more than simply define words. They give quotations for each word’s use. The marvellously idiosyncratic Samuel Johnson’s A dictionary of the English language of 1755 is perhaps the best and most personal historical dictionary; the Oxford English dictionary is one of the most widely known.

The United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand are among the countries whose English is different enough from British English to merit a historical dictionary. Surprisingly, the polar regions also have their distinctive words, and they are captured here. A polar dictionary includes quotations from the author’s thirty-five years of work on the project. Most of the 3000 words defined in this book do not yet feature in the Oxford English dictionary, although many of them might be there one day.

The regions covered by the dictionary extend beyond the polar circles to cold places as remote as the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Tristan da Cunha, and the Falkland Islands. The words relate to all aspects of life—weather, ice and snow, auroras, clothes, food, housing, social structures, music, wildlife, plants, education, politics.

Some are tens or hundreds of years old. The earliest use in English of kamleika for a water-resistant garment (traditionally made of gutskin) is in 1830. The dictionary includes prosaic words like day or night because a day (or night) at either the North or South Pole can last for six months rather than twelve hours. Natural history is strongly represented—the northern bog lemming, the Greenland shark, the Peary caribou, the snow petrel, and the emperor penguin. Climate heating has brought us arctic amplification. Deracinating practices instituted by governments in the US and Canada (and in other former British colonies) included the residential school and Alaska’s afterborn.

The quotations of A polar dictionary illuminate the history and culture of the polar regions, documenting the often disastrous meeting of polar with non-polar worlds, and practices and material possessions now fading or gone from everyday life. The author sees her book as one of the first steps to explore the English language of polar regions. She can be contacted at coldwords@gmail.com.

Feature Image: On 14 July 2011, US Coast Guard Cutter Healy passed through patches of dirty sea ice in a shallow region of the Arctic Ocean. Dirt in the ice from churned up sediments increases the amount of sunlight absorbed and boosts melt, leading to sand-castle-like shapes. A two-year ship-based NASA study in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas during the arctic summers of 2010 and 2011 investigated how changing conditions in the Arctic affect the ocean’s chemistry and ecosystems. Credit: NASA/Kathryn Hansen.
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Bernadette Hince

Bernadette Hince is an honorary fellow in the Australian National Dictionary Centre at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, with a background in English, historical botany and environmental studies. Her doctoral thesis (ANU 2005) was an environmental history of six French, Australian and NZ subantarctic islands, none permanently inhabited. Early work on a historical dictionary of Australian English inspired a long-term love of dictionaries. Her earlier books have included The antarctic dictionary (2000).

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