A small thing in the larger world perhaps but Collins, the dictionary publisher, may have set a revolution going. If so it's because they just announced the first instance of a dictionary allowing input not only from the usual suspects – staff lexicographers – but from the public, or to use the pertinent language: the crowd.

Crowdsourcing, at least partially inspired by James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds, Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few, is first recorded in 2004. The philosophy of the more the merrier. And more creative. Now that task could include lexicography.

Everyone, we know, and thanks to self-publishing can now see, seems to have a novel in them. Maybe there's a dictionary too. For the last couple of months Collins has thrown open their files to all-comers. Suggest a word that qualifies for their dictionary and win a prize! Examples include Twittersphere, sexting, cyberstalking and captcha. Other contenders include mantyhose and photobombing. And amazeballs, an expression of enthusiasm.

Such shout-outs are the antithesis of traditional lexicography. "The dictionary" represents authority. "Is it in the dictionary?", "I'll look it up in the dictionary", and so on. If the dictionary-maker is a humble archivist while the lexicon is being created, they become a deity – or at least a cut-rate Moses – once it appears and becomes a source of supposedly trustworthy information.

The English dictionary, born in 1604, is four centuries old. Its first authors were soloists, often teachers or writers. Their exemplar remains Samuel Johnson, coiner of his job's self-deprecating definition: the harmless drudge (even if a glance at Johnson's persona suggests that no man ever wrote with tongue more deeply embedded in his cheek.) Johnson's Dictionary ruled at least the British roost until the 1880s when the Oxford English Dictionary began appearing. Alongside it appeared smaller works from such as Cassell, Chambers and Collins, all responding to an expanding mass literacy. Like the language, the task had grown: the individual, however dedicated and knowledgeable, could no longer do it. Henceforth lexicography was a profession, its practitioners a linguistic priesthood. To underpin their expertise they read, and in time took on new media and drew on vast digitised collections of usage examples known as corpora. But invariably, they kept it in-house. Now, thanks to Collins – and their crowd – this may be changing.

Of course trendy new words are the publicity launchpad for every new dictionary in a crowded field. They may vanish tomorrow – the longevity of a word is as hard to calculate as the long-term effects of the French Revolution – but today they push the product. That they come from the crowd is touted as a new democratisation: less kindly opinions might opt for "gimmick". Oxford University's Professor Deborah Cameron has termed it "less a democracy than a tyranny of nutters". Still, there are no sock-puppets, and reference publishing – in deep doo-doo – must do what it can.

We live in a relativist world: nothing is objectively "better" than anything else. To argue otherwise is elitist and reprehensible. This newspaper and other media seem to have abandoned confidence: every text is postscripted "What Do You Think?" But the dictionary is not designed for second-guessing. If it is not intensively researched, edited, proofed and rendered as "true" as possible, why bother to consult it? Of course dictionaries are human inventions and subject to human failings. How not. Research continues and research means revision. All the better. But the days of Johnson's cracks about oats and Scotland are over and the aim is the disinterested assembly of material.

And if not? Then we have the Urban Dictionary. Every line a laff, but do we believe this farrago of misinformation, theorising, one-off terms and a level of "definition" based on a count of thumbs up and down? There is gold too, but often lost among the dross. Let us look up "slang", always a challenge. Top definition: "The only reason Urbandictionary.com exists." I'm sorry but this does not help. If I want fun, then I'll go to Roger's Profanisaurus. But I, and millions of others, also want practical, utile facts.

Letting in the street will end no worlds but will it improve the quality of dictionaries? Form as ever faces off content. The form can be democratic as all hell, but in lexicon-land, surely the content is what matters. My own speciality, slang dictionaries, may engender a good deal of browsing, but slang fans also want to discover what an entry means.

Reference should be online. The opportunities for presentation, for breadth of information and for sophisticated searches that would be impossible in a print dictionary are too good to miss. But if reference is to remain useful then it cannot become amateur hour. The public can be informers , and we are duly grateful. But if we don't want to be told that fuck comes from "fornicate under command of the king", or crap from Thomas Crapper then the experts, willy-nilly, still have to be the cops.

Trust me, I'm a lexicographer.