Lexicon
A lexicon is a dictionary-like group of terms and their definitions, written by a quizbowl club. The term consists largely of quizbowl lingo, humorous practice incidents, and club in-jokes. Despite this, most lexica attempt to provide their audience with their club's brand of quizbowl humor, and are often successful.
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. Since that time, lexicon writing has been slowly dying out.
David Hamilton's classic guide to lexica, last updated in November 2000, may be found here.
Matt Weiner has advocated that more teams should have lexica.
List of currently available lexica
Many of these lexica have not been updated in quite some time, and so may read rather dated. Some of these teams don't even exist anymore, but their lexica still do. Some clubs, such as Western Ontario, are known to have once had lexica, but those lexica cannot be currently found.
- Berkeley plus Bonus Material ( 30-20-10 questions on Spring 2001 club members)
- Boston University club constitution
- Bowling Green (pre-2004)
- Brandeis
- Caltech
- Carnegie Mellon
- Columbia (note: no actual definitions provided)
- Dartmouth new (note: currently under construction) 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)
- Oklahoma
- Ottawa
- Oxford University plus Bonus Material
- Princeton
- Rochester
- Scripps
- Stanford
- Swarthmore post-1998? and pre-1998?
- Tulane
- UCLA post-2008 and pre-2008
- 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 (note: contains no actual content)
- Williams (note: under construction)
- WUSTL