Can the Dictionary Keep Up?
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Current Issue
Books & the Arts
/ March 4, 2026
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
Lora Kelley
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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.”
Books in review
Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat To) the Modern Dictionary
by Stefan Fatsis
Buy this book
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 …
This deserves loud pushback.
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Current Issue
Books & the Arts
/ March 4, 2026
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
Lora Kelley
Share
Copy Link
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Ad Policy
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.”
Books in review
Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat To) the Modern Dictionary
by Stefan Fatsis
Buy this book
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 …
Can the Dictionary Keep Up?
This deserves loud pushback.
Log In
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Can the Dictionary Keep Up?
Magazine
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Magazine
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Economy
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Current Issue
Books & the Arts
/ March 4, 2026
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
Lora Kelley
Share
Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Email
Ad Policy
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.”
Books in review
Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat To) the Modern Dictionary
by Stefan Fatsis
Buy this book
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 …
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