UNABRIDGED

A romp in the land of lexicography.

Journalist Fatsis, author of the kindred book Word Freak, talked his way into the headquarters of Merriam-Webster in Springfield, Massachusetts, after learning that “the company was overhauling its foundational book, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged.” The last major revision had occurred decades earlier, in 1961, totaling some 465,000 words—and, given that speakers of the English language were coining words (“Doomscrolling one year, cheugy another, rizz the next”) far faster than the dictionary could keep up with, there was plenty to do. Yet, as Fatsis chronicles, Merriam-Webster was the last dictionary standing: Its competitors had folded their tents, and though alone in the field, even Merriam-Webster was forced to lay off employees as Google and Wikipedia became go-to sources for information, albeit at far lower quality. Fatsis writes engagingly of lexicographic heroes such as Madeline Kripke, who amassed perhaps the finest language library in the world but died of Covid-19 before that new word could be added. He gamely wades into linguistic controversies, one being the inclusion of the “n-word,” which occasioned a boycott in the late 1990s and a sage but unpersuasive reply from the publisher that “to remove the word from the dictionary would simply mislead people by creating the false impression that racial slurs are no longer part of our culture, and that, tragically, is not the case.” And Fatsis, who crafted 90 definitions for M-W (alt-right, burkini, microaggression), and who begins his book by wondering whether human editors are on the way out in favor of artificial intelligence, reckons that AI is “good at some things, bad at others, and, as of the publication of this book’s first edition in late 2025, not a threat to completely upend the last gladiators of commercial lexicography.”

An entertaining, instructive look into how words make their way into the dictionary.