He also introduces us to terms that will likely be new to many readers: “sportscrat”, “on the run”, “vajazzle” and the German word Blowpipe facewhich is defined as “a person deserving of a slap or blow.” Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical brother, was his example until he came across a tweet from Ted Cruz's college roommate. “When I met Ted in 1988,” it said, “I had no words to describe him, but only because I didn’t speak German.”
Facis, somewhat reluctantly, concludes that not only may the dictionary be on its last legs as a commercial enterprise, but that lexicographical expertise is drying up along with it. He cites an estimate that twenty-five years ago there were two hundred full-time lexicographers in the United States. Today he believes the number is “probably closer to thirty.” “By the time I finished this book,” he writes, “it was not clear how long it would take flesh, bone, and blood lexicographers to chronicle the development of the English language.”
Most free online dictionaries (the free merriam-webster.com was originally based on the eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate; the company also has a subscription site) do not provide much lexicographic detail. They are mainly intended for people who like to play with words. Definitions and correct spelling are no longer the main attraction. The websites feature “words of the day,” crosswords and word games, emoji lists, trending slang, usage tips (“Nip it in the butt” or “nip it in the bud?”), translation programs, and, of course, advertising. Poets and professors are still seduced by the supercalifragilistic-experiadotic (which the OED considers a word) Oxford English Dictionary, built on a database dating back to 1857. It is assumed that W. H. Auden had become quite worn out in his first copy of the OED by referring to it so often.
But OED is subsidized. Merriam-webster.com – no. He needs eyeballs to survive. Merriam-Webster is now owned by the Encyclopedia Britannica, another big print-era brand (the original edition was published in Scotland in 1768) that has struggled to compete in an online arena dominated by the nonprofit Wikipedia. Britannica has been losing market share since 1993, when Microsoft released its digital encyclopedia Encarta. Facis quotes a Britannica editor who disparagingly compared Wikipedia to a public toilet—a comparison not entirely wrong. It's not the most elegant site, but everyone uses it. Britannica stopped printing physical volumes in 2012.
The problem with Merriam-Webster is that it is too easy to get definitions for free. The problem for the rest of us is the same, but for a different reason. Like everything on the Internet, searching for a word opens up a torrent of controversy and misinformation. The belief that the old Merriam-Webster's Collegiate book, once an iconic gift for graduating eighth graders, contained the precise definition, spelling and pronunciation of every word an educated person needed to know was the result of a clever promotion. But so what? It had authority. This may have only been confirmed by Merriam-Webster's market position, but we live in a market economy. This should be enough for us. The relationship of the signifier to the signified is (as we all know) arbitrary. We can live with arbitrariness. We just need the relationship to be stable, and the old Merriam-Webster to be the touchstone of stability. We've lost it. Does it matter?
Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, published in London in 1755, gave the dictionary a specific role: to establish what would become known as Standard English. Johnson himself recognized that language is a living thing, constantly changing. But his dictionary, despite its persuasiveness, was a huge publishing success. He was considered authoritative until the nineteenth century. In England it will be replaced by the Oxford English Dictionary. But in the United States, its role was usurped by Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, which debuted in 1828.
Webster deliberately intended to replace Johnson. His goal was not to create a dialect of British English, but a distinctly American language. Johnson's dictionary contained about forty-two thousand words; Webster had seventy thousand. Webster added New World words including “skunk”, “accelerate” and “roundabout”; words of Native American origin such as “canoe” and “moose”; words borrowed from Mexican Spanish, such as “coyote”. Most dramatically, he Americanized spelling, a project begun in his earlier work, a school spelling textbook called The English Grammar Institute, published in 1783. It is because of Webster that we write “defense” and “center” rather than “defense” and “center,” “public” rather than “public.” He changed the language.
Webster's New International Dictionary, second edition, billed as “complete”, appeared in 1934. Web. II was a door stopper—six hundred thousand entries, thirty-five thousand place names, and, in the appendix, thirteen thousand biographical names. This is really not only a dictionary, but also an encyclopedia. There are full-page illustrations of “Coins of the World,” “Common Birds of America,” “Poisonous Plants,” and so on. Some publications include a four-hundred-page Handbook of the History of the World. There are twenty definition entries starting with the word banana.
