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Is the Dictionary Done For? 42

Posted by msmash from the look-it-up-if-you-can-find-it dept.
In the late 1980s, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary sat on the New York Times best-seller list for 155 consecutive weeks and eventually sold 57 million copies, a figure believed to be second only to the Bible in the United States -- but those days are thoroughly gone. Stefan Fatsis's new book "Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary" chronicles what Louis Menand describes in The New Yorker as "a losing struggle" for legacy dictionaries to survive in the internet age.

The profession has been decimated: an estimated 200 full-time lexicographers worked in the US 25 years ago, and Fatsis believes that number is "probably closer to thirty" today. "By the time I finished this book," Fatsis writes, "it wasn't clear how long flesh-bone-and-blood lexicographers would be needed to chronicle the march of the English language."

Merriam-Webster is now owned by Encycloaedia Britannica, another print-era giant that stopped publishing physical volumes in 2012. The company's free website draws about a billion page views annually, but the content has shifted dramatically -- word games, trending slang and ads dominate rather than lexicographic depth. The scale of the challenge facing dictionaries is staggering. One study of digitized library books found the English lexicon grew from about 600,000 words in 1950 to over a million by 2000, and concluded that 52% of English words in printed books are "lexical dark matter" that appears in no standard reference work.
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Is the Dictionary Done For? More

Is the Dictionary Done For?

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  • Paper Dictionaries Are Done (Score:5, Funny)

    by organgtool ( 966989 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2025 @04:57PM (#65878147)
    If I need to look up the definition of a word, I do what everyone else does and go to urbandictionary.com.

  • When you start publicly redefining words based on political whim, you tend to lose credibility.

    RIP Miraim-Webster.

    • Whether we like it or not, popular definitions of words change over time - that's been true for as long as language has existed. Typically the biggest driver of these changes is younger people, not politics.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Cito ( 1725214 )

        Politicizing and redefining words to pretend they're offensive is typically something retarded faggots do.

      • Language changing over time is one thing. Things like grammar being distorted to suit the political whims of certain movements is totally another. Nobody uses "they" or "them" as singular, except the gender wackjobs

    • 1975 vs 1985 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by will4 ( 7250692 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2025 @05:39PM (#65878243)

      The break line is about 1980 when the 'inconvenient' historical meaning of words, "pelted him with a snowball" versus "a pelt of a beaver", became a focus.

      Redefining language is about narrative control and silencing others.

      - Inconvenient words (and ideas) are excluded from the common discourse
      - Words and phrases are turned from their non-offensive meaning to an offensive meaning (and into ones with negative implications for your being employed)
      - Modes of speech and references are categorized into good / bad
      - Dividing people into groups so that any part of (person demographics) + (speech) + (difference in opinion) can be turned into a lose your job offense, exclusion from society, ...
      - Commonly used words for socially negative behavior are softened and replaced with words seeking to "absolve" the person from their socially negative behavior (for only favored groups of people)
      - The growth of approved persons from approved demographics gaining the unelected social power to interject themselves as judges of right and wrong; approved and punishable; social interactions. Those same approved unelected persons gaining the ability to judge and punish on less than a system of due process and innocent by default.

      Repeating - All of these are for narrative control and silencing others so that everyone is "guilty" of some punishable "offense" at any time.

      The common theme is a need for the 4% of the population focused on "policing others and policing social behavior" in the constant need to invent new derogatory terms for existing behavior, new ways to be offended, and making other people responsible for your feeling of safety even for irrational cases.

      This allows those in the 4% to continually expand what everyone else must do and what government and tax payers should pay for as a way to gain power and control.

      The easiest way to identify it is to determine if the person invents new derogatory terms for existing behavior of other demographic groups or repeatedly seeks out, learns and has to label things with the latest new derogatory terms. The need to shame and condemn in general, like the Victorians and some of the early 1980s right leaning political groups.

    • You mean such as words like "they" or "them" suddenly becoming singular, or terms like "cisgender" suddenly getting invented?

      Mirriam-Webster didn't try pushing back on this, so if people have stopped trusting them for those reasons, they have only themselves to blame

  • Sausage?! Oh, blast your eyes!

  • And I don't use any of them anymore. Granted, the online dictionaries generally suck, but they're close enough and far easier to use.

    • Agreed. Although there are several more unusual words that one doesn't necessarily find in online dictionaries. Try "polypragnomist"

  • Classrooms where they don't allow digital gizmos still buy piles of dictionaries.

  • The tragedy isn’t that dictionaries are dying; it’s that we replaced Johnson with Baldrick, and automated the fireplace.

  • Not So Fast (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SlashbotAgent ( 6477336 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2025 @05:54PM (#65878285)

    I visit https://m-w.com/ [m-w.com] a few times per week and https://oed.com/ [oed.com] a few times per month.

    I suppose I might come to rely on AI lies in the future.

    "Yes! Crommulent is a great word choice. Would you like me to show you how to use it in a sentence?"

  • As in straight-up invent new nonsense words and redefine existing words to suit their subjective preferences at a lightening clip...the *perceived authority* of the dictionary is very much done for.

    Then again the Kids These Days have been playing word games since Plato and Socrates were complaining about how the written word dulls the faculty of memory....

    • The problem with that is misunderstanding. In vernacular speech this isn't a big deal, who cares if somebody doesn't understand that you're going to lunch. But if you have to do something that matters, that's a bigger risk. What I find particular amusing is folks' absolute ignorance of common sayings. The first time I heard "It's a doggy-dog world" I asked the person to repeat - then I explained what it was, and was told 'oh, no , that's not it.' In true genX fashion I said 'whatever, but you still sound

      • Do tell, what is your opinion on the subject of people mispronouncing somewhat uncommon but not unheard-of words as if they'd only seen them in print?

        Like "chasm" pronounced with ch- as in "chase" or "treatise" rhyming with ice?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
        Right, I'm in yte same way wit the -gete postfix. If I'm not mistaken It refers to The Watergate scandal tkat ended up With a US president (If memory serves Nixon) having to resign. But it seams to be applied a bit to frequently. A smartphone manufacturer screws up antenna design = antenagate etc etc. I will grant the use of batterygate , for the Samsung batteries that literally went up in smoke, lithium fires are nasty and almost impossible to put out, jou dont want that in your pocket or next to your bed.
  • "One study of digitized library books found the English lexicon grew from about 600,000 words in 1950 to over a million by 2000, and concluded that 52% of English words in printed books are "lexical dark matter" that appears in no standard reference work." I'd like to take a look at that study to see how they handled technical vocabulary, misspellings, typos, and scannos. URL or other ref. data?
    • It's mostly technical and industry-specific jargon. Although the quip about those "appears in no standard reference work" is a bit disingenuous. "No consolidated reference work" would be a better way to phrase it, as there's all sorts of dictionaries and lexicons out there that are specific to various subject matters, and many of those are standard in their fields. Heck, I once ran across a dictionary of naval terminology (I forget the exact title), and it consisted of something like four volumes, each one
  • Well, since we now prize illiteracy, that's no doubt true. Of course, this isn't new and has been growing since the 90s, so, no surprise.
  • Considering how much language has been morphing - often along political lines - to mean different things to different people, it would be great to have a single source that people could go to. Of course what we find though is that if someone of affiliation A points someone of affiliation B to a dictionary website, the person of affiliation B will tell them their source is wrong and brush them off. Finding one source that all people can trust is a challenge.

  • I keep a Merriam-Webster dictionary published the year I was born, so I can look up what words really mean and meant before the ad-men, leftists, and pseudo-journalists got hold of them.

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