If you are a lexicographer or linguist or an etymologist or a philologist you should hang up now and get back to your chores of defining and citing. I am a rank amateur on this topic, but then again that has never stopped me from weighing in before.
Outside the group of professional word nerds, I am perhaps one of the few laymen to have read not 1, but 2 books about the creation of a dictionary, word nerd I am. The first, The Professor and the Madman is about the creation of The Oxford English Dictionary - or OED to we crossword aficionados. The second is Unabridged:The Thrill of (and the Threat to) the Modern Dictionary, covering the evolution from Noah Webster’s first “American English” dictionary through the Merriam-Webster incarnations. Reading these books made it clear to me I could barely strive to be a third-rate hobby horse lexicographer. The true believers are unbelievably anal over words.
Some biases may have slipped in
from Wikipedia
In the early 1800's, Noah Webster became a household name because of his 120 page Blue Back Speller which made its way into schoolrooms across the country. His speller introduced the concept of phonics and emphasized the use of syllables (e.g., a-bom-i-na-tion). The speller was not just word lists. Webster was a bit of a moralist so it included moral lessons, fables and reading exercises.
How's your memory of the past 25 years? I suspect these words might send you into flashback mode.
Samuel Johnson's Dictionary
I also possess a copy of Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary, "the work that defined the English language". He spent 9 years creating it. It defined the dictionary format that remains in place to this day: word, part of speech, pronunciation, etymology, definition(s), quotation(s).
e.g. lexicographer noun [French] A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words. "Commentators and lexicographers acquainted with the Syriac language, have given these hints in their writings on scripture. Watt's Improvement of the Mind.
Some of Johnson's definitions have altered over time.
e.g. nice adj [nese Saxon, soft] Accurate in judgment to minute exactness It is often used to express a culpable delicacy. Nor be so nice in taste myself to know, if what I swallowed be thrush or no. Perseus
Some biases may have slipped in
e.g. tory noun [a cant term, derived I suppose, from an Irish word signifying a savage.] One who adheres to the antient constitution of the state and the apostolical hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to whig. The knight is more tory in the country than the town, because it more advances his interests. Addison.
oats noun [Saxon] A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.
serendipity, coined in 1754 did not make it into Johnson's dictionary. It is termed one of the 10 most difficult English words to translate. Julius Comroe said, “Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer’s daughter.” Other words in the top ten include plenipotentiary, gobbledegook, poppycock, whimsy, spam, and kitsch.
Johnson's dictionary (2 volumes) sold for £4 10s, several months wages for a laborer at the time and suffered poor sales. The following year Johnson issued an abridgment, excluding the quotations. It sold 1000 copies a year for 30 years and most English households acquired one.
Johnson's dictionary was definitive until it was superceded (not a typo, English spelling) by the Oxford English Dictionary which was published in installments between 1884-1928.
OED
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the gold standard when it comes to English dictionaries. Its publication began in 1884 with fascicles issued periodically, the first covering A-B. It was a crowd-sourced document, long before the term crowd-sourced existed. In 1928 it was issued in 10 volumes. The chief editor for most of the project, Sir James Murray, enlisted a number of scholars and dozens of amateur philologists as volunteers. Enter the book The Professor and the Madman, A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester. Turns out, the most prolific contributor of definitions, quotes and word origins was William Chester Minor, a retired US Army surgeon, who just happened to be confined in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in Berkshire, England, this fact only discovered when the editors sought to honor him. Dr. Minor had submitted more than 10,000 entries. [Incidentally, this book was made into a movie in 2019 starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn]
from Wikipedia
The 20-volume OED2 (1989) was republished in 1991 as a compact edition (ISBN 978-0-19-861258-2). The format was re-sized to one-third of original linear dimensions, a nine-up ("9-up") format requiring a stronger magnifying glass (included), but allowing publication of a single-volume dictionary. The edition released in 1991 includes definitions of 500,000 words, in 290,000 main entries, with 137,000 pronunciations, 249,300 etymologies, 577,000 cross-references, and 2,412,000 illustrative quotations.
If you include scientific terms, slang, obsolete words the total number of words in the English language is well over a million, perhaps nearer 2 million. The average American's vocabulary consists of 20-35 thousand words with "active vocabulary" (i.e. used regularly) of around 10,000 words and a "passive" (i.e. recognized words) double that.
Merriam Webster
Unabridged by Stefan Fatsis tells the story of the American dictionaries from Noah Webster's original "American English" dictionary and its acquisition by the Merriam company, resulting in a 150 years of Merriam-Webster editions and the eventual obsolescence of print dictionaries killed by the internet.
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| Blue Back Speller |
He then set to work on an "American" dictionary. So .. plow not plough; theater not theatre; jail not gaol, His dictionary contained 70,000 words. He created his final entry - zygomatic - in 1828, I suspect with a sigh of relief. Webster's Dictionary pushed Noah into the immortal category. The name Webster became synonymous with dictionary forever more,
Noah Webster died in 1843. In 1844, George & Charles Merriam purchased the rights to the Webster and set about creating an affordable (and profitable) dictionary. Their first offering sold for $10.50, a significant expenditure in the 1840's but it launched a company that was the dominant dictionary publisher for 150 years. Their 12 editions of the American Collegiate Dictionary has had sales second only to the Bible.
Fatsis' 'Unabridged' documents the history of Merriam-Webster (and to a lesser degree OED and other dictionary publishers). The process of producing a dictionary is a meticulous one, with lexicographers researching thousands of words, their origins and citations from wide ranging sources taking upwards of 10 years to complete. Fatsis documents this process in excruciating but interesting detail. There's a chapter devoted solely to slurs. And another on pronouns ('You' is plural. 'Thou' is singular. You are .. is proper usage. 'They' is is fine.)
All words are not "dictionary worthy" so editors constantly debate in/out. Before computers, every candidate word, its derivation and proposed definition was captured on a 3x5 card called a slip - maybe a million of them. So, what's your verdict? In or out? Smashmouth, GOAT, sheeple, nothingburger, dog whistle, absquatulate?
It is said that a dictionary, with each edition, presents a window into the culture of the times. One example of this is Merriam-Webster Webster’s annual Word of the Year (WOTY) contest where each year word professionals gather to nominate candidates and vote to determine the word that is most reflective of the past year. A lexicographers' academy awards.
Here are the winners from 2003-2025.
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| From Wikipedia |
Merriam-Webster was the last print version American dictionary standing. Gone are Funk & Wagenalls, Random House, American Heritage, … I imagine you have one gathering dust on a shelf
Google and AI
When is the last time you looked up a word in your Merriam-Webster print dictionary? I can’t remember either. How often do you look up a word online or from the built in dictionary in Kindle? Most every day I suspect. Print dictionaries have collided with the iceberg that is Google and have disappeared beneath the internet waves. But dictionary “editions” continue to be released with online updates made rapidly and without fanfare.
In the 1990's Alta Vista, Excite, Ask.com and Dictionary.com made their appearances and swept away print dictionaries. And then Google arrived and swept them away.
The new age of word management is a super computer job. In the age of social media, bloggers :-) and non-traditional media, it is a challenge to identify new words that are worthy of being added to the canon and to deliver updated editions in a timely manner Firstly, there are so many being generated by non-traditional publishers - like me. An analysis of the 5.2 million digitized Google books found 52% of the English lexicon therein was “dark matter”, that is undocumented.
Lexicography now depends on compute power. Not just Google search to identify where and how many usages of a word but the creation of "corpora", collections of utterances used in descriptive analysis of the language. aggregating categories of writings from various sources - press, religion, popular fiction, memoirs, general fiction, adventure and western lit, romance, humor etc into a 'corpus'. The Corpus of ContemporaryAmerican English (COCA) contains over a billion words. So let loose supercomputers and turn lexicographers into programmers to discover new words and debate the case for inclusion in the dictionary. Here's where human editors enter the scene. The criteria for this is a bit fuzzy, based largely on whether the 'new' word is in general use. Take 'kakistocracy' for example - instances of this word increased 13,700%. Or 'thobber'.
And AI. Ask Gemini to define a word in the style of Merriam-Webster, or OED. The result is pretty good. Could AI generate a new dictionary edition overnight? Likely, if people are OK with "good enough", a concept abhorrent to the professional lexicographers.
Someone, certainly a linguist, said "language is like the great white shark. It must keep moving or it dies."
Postscript
For those of you who managed to get this far, how many words did you look up in this read? Or did you just skip over the obscure words? A side goal in writing this was to push you to open your dictionary.
Copyright © 2026 Dave Hoplin
