Books & the Arts / Can the Dictionary Keep Up? In Stefan Fatsis’s capacious, and at times score-settling, personal history of the reference book, he reveals what the dictionary can still tell us about language in modern life
A page taken from the Merriam-Webster’s Desktop Dictionary, 2016.
(AFP / Karen BLEIER via Getty Images)
In 2014, at a small Stanford University lecture hall, the Merriam-Webster editor Peter Sokolowski introduced the crowd of assembled nerds to the idea that a dictionary is not a static document but a living object, constantly updated and remade in response to how people write and speak. In a talk titled “The Dictionary as Data,” Sokolowski emphasized that the editors at Merriam-Webster look to how the general public uses language to guide their work. He shared enticing tidbits, including that xi and za, classic Scrabble words, were popular late-night searches in the online dictionary, and that people regularly look up love ahead of Valentine’s Day. Awed, I wrote in a campus magazine a few days later that “we forget that the dictionary, a seeming bastion of objective reality, is compiled by people who use language, too.”
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I had not, until that evening, thought much about how the dictionary came to be the way it is. I had always seen it as one of those things that was just kind of there, like a textbook or a museum wall text or the other ambient bits of language that seemed to arrive in front of me for my education and consumption.
But the totemic reference book that we know as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Sokolowski argued, is a dynamic text. The book is formal and highly structured; it seems like something from another, vaguely bygone time. Still, dictionary editors have long paid close attention to how language is used and perused—in signs, in novels, in articles and pronouncements, and lately on the Web. Sokolowski told us about how he could trace the emotional ripples of tragedies by looking at the data on the words that people look up in the online dictionary. In the immediate aftermath of an event like 9/11, he stated, people might first look up the unfamiliar matter-of-fact words (rubble, triage), then the technical or conceptual ones (terrorism, jingoism). Soon, though, people turn to the psychological ones (succumb, surreal). We don’t just go to the dictionary to learn new words; sometimes, in moments of flux, it’s an attempt to latch on to a source of vetted truth, and to confirm what we thought we understood.
In January of 2020, for example, the word pandemic started trending on the dictionary’s website; on March 11, searches for that word exploded. Eight days later, coronavirus spiked. At different points that year, searches for mamba, malarkey, and defund also skyrocketed. On election night 2024, the top searches on Merriam-Webster.com included fascism, LOL, bellwether, and gaslighting. Through it all, irregardless remained a very popular search (Merriam-Webster says it is a word and a synonym for regardless, though it suggests using the latter “if you wish to avoid criticism” because the former is “widely disliked”).
The Internet has sired and popularized a huge range of new terms. Twerking and trolling, Karens and -core, dumpster fire and microaggression and post-truth and safe spaces, Covid and rawdog and OK Boomer have floated into the mainstream vocabulary. As absurd or obscene as these words may be, dictionary editors track them, keeping an eye on their usage and circulation. And if the words meet a set of rigorous standards, the editors allow them into the book itself, or at least the online version. That’s because the role of the contemporary dictionary is not to prescribe how we talk but to describe how language is used.
It wasn’t always this way. In the dictionary’s early days, which Stefan Fatsis enthusiastically recounts in his roving new book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary, gatekeepers pronounced from on high. The 1604 Table Alphabeticall aimed to “helpe” the “ignorant” learn about words and ideas in the English language.
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