The publication of dictionaries has been associated with the Webster name since Noah Webster’s first dictionary in 1806 and his ground breaking "American Dictionary of English" in 1828.
Following Webster’s death in 1843, two brothers, George and Charles Merriam, acquired the rights to Webster’s dictionaries. And in 1898 the Merriams published an abridged portable dictionary, it was the first of what became known as "Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary."
In the ensuing 127 years, only eleven Collegiates were published. The last was 22 years ago— until now. In November, Merriam-Webster announced the publication of a new Collegiate, the 12th.
For Linda Wood, Merriam-Webster’s director of print products, production of a new print dictionary is part of the company’s legacy.
“It's something we've always done. We continue to print dictionaries, as we always have, but the Collegiate took a little while longer. We were busy doing other things, working mostly on our website," she said. "We found the opportunity to take what we learned from the website and and put it back into our traditional print form.”
Wood indicated that producing an online dictionary and producing a print dictionary are totally different.
“When you're working in print, the idea is — keep it succinct, keep it short. You only have so much space. And the mindset for online is do whatever you want. You have almost unlimited space,” Wood said.
According to Em Vezina, Merriam-Webster’s senior director of editorial operations, the underlying concept behind the 12th, was a print dictionary for these times.
“This is a print book for the digital age. That was our guiding star,” she said.
This objective guided every aspect of the 12th’s production, according to Vezina.
“Everything we did was thinking about the project through that lens. That is what we were thinking about when we were thinking about how to reduce the content to fit into a book. It's what we thought about when we were thinking about the design. It really affected every decision that we made,” she said.
For Wood and the editorial team, production of the Collegiate was informed by their experience with their online dictionary and having the website was an advantage in the production of the 12th.
“Of our top 500 lookups, the number one lookup, is the word love. It's a word everyone knows how to spell. Everyone has a basic understanding of what it means and, yet we crave more information. We crave more connection. I feel like this is all part of the package. To me, that feels something that's really special about this book.”—Em Vezina,
“We are able to tell exactly what people were looking up and what they weren't. So why waste space in our book on words that people are not looking up? So we used that lookup data to determine what should stay and what should go,” Wood said.
Karen Wilkerson, Merriam-Webster’s director of defining, described that the production of the 12th Collegiate was unlike any dictionary that Merriam-Webster had previously produced.
“We were starting with a dictionary that was already up-to-date, and what we wanted to do was refocus it. We would have a group of editors focusing on one aspect of the book, such as cutting. We had another group of editors working on top 500. We had another group working on usage paragraphs and word history paragraphs and so on and so forth,” she said.
The website data helped inform Wilkerson and editors about both what to cut and what to highlight. The Top 500, the most looked-up words online, was a new print dictionary feature that came directly from what was learned from online data.
“Those are the words that people are looking up the most and that they clearly have questions about. People are looking for answers to usage doubts," she said. "A lot of these words tend to be abstract concepts. Paradox, for example, is a commonly looked up word. People are trying to figure out what these words mean, how they're used, in what context they're used. We wanted to answer those questions. That's where the top 500 came from.”
In addition to 5,000 new words and, 1,000 new phrases, Wood says there are other new features from online including word lists.
“We have many galleries and fun features that people like on the website. And so the lists are an attempt to sort of bring that kind of fun into the dictionary," she said. "There are lists that are thematic, words that come from various languages, words from various subject areas. My own favorite is words from the natural world, because the words in that list to me are just so evocative and poetic.”
Em Vezina and all of the editors spoke about how they felt that the new Collegiate is special, particularly at this moment in time.
“People still take pleasure, especially in this digital age of going back to things that are tangible, that you can flip through, you can look at. Something that I think more people are thinking harder about is how to maintain connection and connection with something that is physical is special," she said. "You stop looking at a screen and something you can feel, you can touch. You can look at side by side with your friends or your family.”
Vezina also indicated that some of the words people look up are not as simple as they seem.
“Of our top 500 lookups, the number one lookup, is the word love. It's a word everyone knows how to spell. Everyone has a basic understanding of what it means and, yet we crave more information. We crave more connection. I feel like this is all part of the package. To me, that feels something that's really special about this book.”
