Lexicon

Before the centralization of quizbowl information into sites like the wiki and the database, many teams maintained a lexicon: a dictionary-like group of terms and their definitions, which would span common quizbowl terms and team in-jokes. This practice began to fade away around 2005 and the inexorable passage of time means that many of these sites are now lost to the sands.

Most lexica attempted to provide their audience with their club's brand of quizbowl humor; results were mixed.

History

The practice of writing lexica is generally considered to have been started by Maryland. Many imitations soon followed, and almost every mid-90s quizbowl team of significance had at least a poor imitation of a lexicon.

David Hamilton's classic guide to lexica, last updated in November 2000, could be found here (link broken).

In 2007, Matt Weiner advocated that more teams should have lexica.

Currently existing lexica

PACE maintains a quizbowl lexicon for people interested in learning basic quizbowl terms and acronyms. This wiki maintains the list of quizbowl lingo and the list of quizbowl in-jokes.

Historical lexica

• Berkeley plus Bonus Material ( 30-20-10 questions on Spring 2001 club members)
• Oklahoma
• Swarthmore post-1998? and pre-1998?
• UCLA post-2008 and pre-2008

The following teams no longer have lexica but the links to their sites still work.

• Oxford University
• Princeton

Defunct lexica

These links no longer work - some of these teams don't even exist anymore. Some clubs, such as Western Ontario, are known to have once had lexica, but those lexica cannot be currently found.

• Boston University club constitution
• Bowling Green
• Brandeis
• Caltech
• Carnegie Mellon
• Columbia
• Dartmouth new and old plus Bonus Material (list of travel disasters)
• Delaware enemies list and retired items on that list
• Depauw list of humorous quotes and negs
• Duke
• Emory
• Florida
• George Washington pre-2005 and pre-2001 plus Bonus Material (a history of the Meow phenomenon)
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Iowa State list of humorous quotes
• Maryland
• Michigan State
• Missouri S&T list of humorous quotes plus Bonus Material (the Jason Mueller page)
• Ottawa
• Rochester
• Scripps
• Stanford
• Tulane
• USC (well, okay, it's the only thing close to an actual lexicon)
• Vanderbilt Censored and Uncensored
• Virginia old and classic
• Virginia Tech newer and older plus Bonus Material (driving stories and tips)
• William and Mary
• Williams
• WUSTL