1135. This week, we talk with Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at Merriam-Webster, about the new print 12th Collegiate Dictionary. We look at why print still matters, how the dictionary used lookup data to decide which words to drop (least looked-up compounds), and the importance of serendipity when researching words in a physical book.
1135. This week, we talk with Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at Merriam-Webster, about the new print 12th Collegiate Dictionary. We look at why print still matters, how the dictionary used lookup data to decide which words to drop (least looked-up compounds), and the importance of serendipity when researching words in a physical book.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at Merriam-Webster. And we are going to talk about the new print, print!, 12th edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. Peter, welcome to the Grammar Girl Podcast.
Peter Sokolowski: It's so great to see you again and to be with you. Thanks.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, you too. Well, you know, this new print dictionary just felt like a huge surprise. I mean, how long has it been since Merriam-Webster published a print dictionary?
Peter Sokolowski: Right. Well, we still publish a lot of print dictionaries, but a new edition of a collegiate, 22 years. The fact is the collegiate came out on years ending with three for a long time: 1963, 73, 83. It was like clockwork. But after 2003, the 11th collegiate, of course you can kind of think 2003, social media starts around 2006, 2007, and our kind of internet, you know, environment that we know today really was formed around those years. And of course, our online dictionary became the principal product. The online dictionary was originally based on the collegiate dictionary, and so we kept revising it as we always had, but there hasn't been a new fully revised print edition in 22 years. And so it is a big deal.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. How long has the print edition been in the works?
Peter Sokolowski: Well, it takes a couple years. I mean, we had it down to a kind of science. It was always like two years, 20-22 months, for the entire staff, all hands on deck to revise the collegiate. The idea behind a revision is that every fact of every entry is checked. That's a tall order. It's a very difficult thing to do. It's something we always tried. For example, the dates, the etymological dates on entries. We want to go through once through and check every one of them to make sure that we don't have new information, new dates, but of course, new tenses of existing words, new words are the obvious thing. And, the kind of job is revision.
So, what happens is we decided to do it, and we decided to keep it a secret while it was in production. And so we just announced, whatever it was, a few weeks ago, and it's kind of an exciting moment. The fact is print has never really left us. We sold a million and a half dictionaries last year in print. Now that includes paperbacks as well as hardcovers. A lot of those are school dictionaries for classrooms and children. A lot of those are paperback dictionaries: the Spanish dictionary, the crossword dictionary, the Scrabble dictionary. So the fact is we've always known that print is still profitable. It's a good business for us, and we recognize that book lovers and word lovers might be the same people. And we decided to make the collegiate a little bit differently. It's more like a gift book than it used to be. It used to be really utilitarian, as you probably know, with tiny, tiny print. So the print's a little bigger, the pages are a little wider, and there are a few fewer words. That is to say, some of the chemical terms, the botanical terms that were really scientific entries have been removed to give us more space to breathe and to make it more fun to consult.
Mignon Fogarty: I mean, my copy hasn't come yet. Can you hold it up so that people watching on YouTube can see what a beautiful book it is?
Peter Sokolowski: Yeah, it's a little bit bigger than our collegiates have been. It still has the thumb notches, which people love. It’s a linen case or linen cover. It has a jacket. It comes with a little band on the back with the information. So this is how it will look in the bookstore. And it does look, as you will see, a little bit brighter and whiter. You know, whiteness, that's maybe something you don't think about, but the whiteness of paper, the opacity of paper, these are things that we think a lot about because they affect usability, but they also affect the cost. So we wanted to make a book that really feels like a gift, like a present, a kind of book to be honest, that you would want to pick up. It does have the little speckled edges. I don't know if you can tell the little red dots and things. So a lot of it is our heritage, and even the cover has a lot of the kind of old iconography that's traditional. And the fact is the collegiate is kind of an American tradition.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I think I got one when I graduated from high school from my grandfather. So, you know, it's a gift book. You know, I asked my followers on social media if they had questions, what do they want to know from you? And Colorblind Cowboy on Mastodon did ask, "Who are the consumers of a print dictionary?” What do people get out of the print that they don't get out of the online dictionary? And you've already talked about some of it. It makes a great gift. And, you know, people use that for different, but like, what else?
Peter Sokolowski: Well, the fact is there are people like me, for example, who read only on paper when I'm on an airplane or when I'm traveling, when I'm reading in bed, it's a real book. I never got into readers. I understand why people like reading on screens. I try to read on paper all the time. I use print dictionaries and online dictionaries every single day. I go between them. Often, the print dictionaries I look at include some of the ones behind me. There are dictionaries that are not digitized. So the fact is I have to use them, and I use them often as reference. I want to see how a word had been treated or used to be defined. And so I'm using it for work purposes, and I just love going back and forth.Â
The fact is the dictionary is a pretty good piece of technology because of the thumb notches; you can find your entry within five or six seconds. That's probably not a lot slower than a lot of load times for webpages. But there's that satisfaction. Yes, there's the heft of it. This book weighs five pounds. It's a little heavier because the paper's heavier. And it’s appealing, it's nice in the hands. It just means you don't have to go to a screen. Many of us live in this age of also, I’m thrilled with the form of the online dictionary. I mean, I am the last generation of Merriam-Webster editors who bridged the gap because when I started at Merriam-Webster, the only computer on the editorial floor was for the payroll. It was the editorial secretary's computer. Things have changed. And so we went online in 1996. I was already working here. And I knew this as a print product as many of us did, but it took me a while. But I do recognize the value of the online dictionary for two reasons, especially. One is space. We have infinite space, so that dictionary definitions, which had been very elliptical, very compressed. We have a kind of technical language that you're probably familiar with of those definitions that are kind of cramped on the page, but also cramped rhetorically. We could open that up. We could give a second or a third substitute, as we say. In other words, restate a definition state in a technical way, state in a slightly less technical way. That's a wonderful thing. More example sentences, more usage information. But then to me, the big kind of killer app of the online dictionary is audio. You could listen to the phonetics. You could hear a word pronounced out loud by a real person.
Mignon Fogarty: Often you.
Peter Sokolowski: Sometimes me. It's sometimes me. But there are a lot of entries and a lot of hard-to-pronounce words in the English language, and it's really one of the greatest parts of the online dictionary. So I came around to being charmed by the online dictionary, however. A lot of that information is very well presented in a book, and it just makes me think of one in particular, which is the serendipity of research. If you look up the word "lunar," you will see that it's next to "lunacy" and "lunation." And now "lunation" is a word that I didn't know. And I recognize that, you know, as well, or "lunet," meaning in the shape of a crescent. So you recognize, okay, "lunar" has to do with the moon, or insanity used to be associated with the cycles of the moon, and "lunation" is the period of 29 days of the, it's the Latin term for what a month is. In other words, the period that a moon transforms.Â
You realize, oh, it brings me to another word, which is the word month. And the word month, of course, is an adaptation of the word moon. In Old English, you had "moon" in "month," and in Latin and French, you had "lunar" and "lunation." I would never have known any of that if they weren't next to each other on the page.
And so, looking up one of those words can draw you to the others and help you recognize, okay, these are siblings; these are cousins. These are words that came from the same Latin root in this case. And you learn five or six words when you look up another one. That kind of serendipity just doesn't happen online in the same way.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. And I love that. You're right. It is so enlightening, and it stirs your curiosity to see those few words around it on the page. I know they try to replicate it online with, sometimes on the sidebar, there's a "words nearby" thing, but it's not the same.
Peter Sokolowski: We've done our best. And it's one of those things; there are a few things about online dictionaries that are just sort of fixed. And it's sort of a double-edged blade. We have the isolation of an entry, which makes it easier to read, and that's what you're going for. That's important. But yes, you lose a lot of that context.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. And so the book also, I mean, a book has a fixed size. You can only print so much in a book. And so my couple of questions that came in are, you know, how do you decide when a word belongs in the dictionary and which ones get kicked out? And then, Sam Levine, I believe on Mastodon, maybe Blue Sky, also asked, when does a word get listed as archaic? Like how few uses does it have to get down to before you decide it's archaic? And then, you know, imagine the next step is like kicked out.
Peter Sokolowski: Right. Well, you know, these are great questions. Let me start with removing words. We don't remove words online because there's no problem with space. For a print dictionary, there is a problem with space, as you say, and we've made the print bigger. One of the things we've done with the 12th Collegiate for the very first time is inform our print program with our data.
And so what we could do, for example, is identify the 10,000 most looked-up words in the language and really address those entries. Make sure they're current, make sure they're well-defined. We could also identify the 10,000 least looked-up words in the dictionary; those are among the ones that were dropped. And again, I mean, just as a broad term, a lot of them are compounds. A word like "enwheel," which means to encircle, is both archaic and a compound. A word like "intercouple" was dropped. In other words, word parts, like words beginning with "non," "un," or "in," tend to be the words that are dropped.
A word like "timberman," another compound meaning a woodsman, and "waterfowler," a hunter of ducks. The idea with dropping those words is that they are self-evident compounds. You can derive their meanings fairly easily so that their lexical intensity, if you will, is less than other kinds of words. The word "foul" itself is very important. The word "water" itself is very important, but if you put them together, you can kind of derive the meaning of those words. So that's how we determine which words to remove.Â
The bigger question is archaic versus obsolete. Those are two different labels, and we actually have a technical measure for some of that, invented right here at Merriam-Webster about 60 years ago. Our chief editor, Philip Gove, had been an English professor himself, and he had studied Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer who wrote really the first modern dictionary of English in 1755. One of the big important things that Johnson did was he defined all the words. He defined the basic words, the Anglo-Saxon words, like "house," "mother," "sister," and "dog," that were often not in dictionaries before that time. He was also a very literate man and kind of invented the idea of the canon of English literature. He also invented the way we consider Shakespeare to be the pinnacle of English literature. His dictionary was full of literary words from Milton, Spenser, and Shakespeare, especially the King James Bible.Â
What we recognized, what Gove recognized, our editor, was that if a word was already out of use in 1755, that would be a word Johnson did not include. If that was also a word that is, say, in Shakespeare or in the Bible, we would include it but with the label "obsolete," which means it was no longer in active use, but it was a word you might encounter in your reading. If a word was sometimes in use or especially was archaic in form, but not in productive speech or spontaneous speech, like "thee" or "thou," words that you hear and understand and might repeat in poetry or prayers. Those are words that we call archaic. We made a dividing line that was kind of the big census of the English language, which was 1755. If it was in use in 1755, we call it archaic. If it was not in use in 1755, we call it obsolete. That's not too much of an answer for you, but I love the specificity of that particular rule.
Mignon Fogarty: No, that's great. And you mentioned compounds, and Fatty Cake on Mastodon—I love these usernames—had asked, you know, I've wondered this too. How do you decide whether words are closed compounds, open compounds, or hyphenated?
Peter Sokolowski: Yeah, that's a case where there's a kind of a circular relationship with other publications. If the New York Times or the Atlantic Magazine chooses to display a term as an open compound, we will recognize that and we will start to see, okay, let's take another kind of census, like let's take a survey. How frequent is this as a hyphenated compound? How frequent as a closed or open? We will present the primary or principal form in the most commonly found form.Â
Now that changes, as you know. I mean, the most famous example was "email," which initially was capital E and a, you know, closed to "mail." Then it was a lowercase "e," and then it was a hyphenated "e." I'm sorry, then it was a lowercase hyphenated "e," and now it's lowercase closed. That went through because of the frequency of that particular word. Of course, frequency is kind of the measure of everything with language. That word very rapidly moved from the capital hyphen to the closed lowercase. If you look in our older editions, you'll see that progression over the years. We do try to keep on top of things. It is really difficult to keep on top of the compound forms.
One problem is that there's an inherent conservatism because the publications are looking at the dictionary, which is looking at the publication. If the publications used to hyphenate or have a closed form, say 20 years ago, they're looking at our reporting of those forms, and then they kind of continue those forms, and they get perpetuated. You might call that a slightly artificial cycle. Newer terms, especially online terms, tend to change more quickly. The older terms tend to change more slowly, and sometimes people have to draw our attention to these terms. A term like "healthcare" or "childcare," it's very important to know what is preferred by the publications that use those terms most frequently. Then we'll try our best to reflect those preferences.
Mignon Fogarty: Right, in their own industry, how are they using it?
Peter Sokolowski: Exactly. They know better than we do.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. And then you mentioned the 10,000 most common words. I know that you also have updated usage guidance for some of the words. That's really exciting to me. I love the usage notes. Were they mostly for those 10,000 most common words, or how much overlap is there between those?
Peter Sokolowski: Yes, absolutely. I mean, the data informed the research, but the fact is there are sort of evergreen questions about "less" and "fewer," or "imply" and "infer," or "further" and "farther," and things that have, questions that have always been asked, and we are certainly prepared to answer and give those little usage paragraphs, which are beautiful. A lot of those paragraphs now are shaded in this edition for the first time, so they're a little bit easier to find and they kind of jump out on the page.Â
This edition also has lists, like top 10 lists. You know, lists of words from French or words from German, words from the 1990s or words from the 1920s that are kind of features, and they're not exactly what you would expect to find in a really utilitarian dictionary. That shows that we anticipate this to be a browser's dictionary. We do have an index of all those little tables at the front of the book, but also in your kind of search, you will find yourself encountering some of those little tables that we have produced for online that you might be familiar with, with some of our online content as an article for a word lover, and as a word lover within the pages of the dictionary, it'll be a new kind of way to encounter that information.Â
And there's also the great word histories. I can show you one about the word "grammar," which is, you know, it's a word history that I know that you know, and it's one of those fun stories, of course. And "grammar." And actually, the story is at the entry for "glamour" because "glamour" and "grammar," of course, are related and they were kind of separated at birth. And there we go. So there's a, I don't know if you can see, but there's a nice little, slightly shaded section right here.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I see a shaded box. Yeah.
Peter Sokolowski: That, you know, "glamour" has a bookish past and it starts with the word "grammar." In the Middle Ages, "grammar" referred to all sorts of learning. And it goes into the fact that these are two words that were separated at birth, like many English words that have, you know, kind of split over time. Now, of course, we don't really associate "glamour" with "grammar." And,...
Mignon Fogarty: What?!
Peter Sokolowski: We don't associate them lexically, but the fact is they were related at the start. And they should be to this day.
Mignon Fogarty: Absolutely. Grammar is so glamorous. Or it can be. Yeah, so we talk about like, we have a new dictionary. We can't talk about a new dictionary without talking about the new words. So what are some of the exciting new words in this new edition?
Peter Sokolowski: Right. There are so many, and again, one thing that I've noticed is that some of our new word releases in the last few years have been more compounds: “coldbrew,” “farm to table,” “dad bod,” “heat dome,” “gaslighting.” You know, that's a new word that really has entered the language, and it is, of course, a compound. “Telework.” But then there are other words that I'm happy to see, like "adulting" is finally defined in the dictionary.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Peter Sokolowski: "Cam," another compound; "fanfic," another compound; “friendzone”; “ghost kitchen”; “hard pass.” One of my favorites is "petrichor."
Mignon Fogarty: Oh yeah.
Peter Sokolowski: Petrichor, of course, this word that refers to the smell of rain on fresh earth or the smell of rain right after it falls on the ground. It's one of those nice words. And we also have the word "geosmin," G-E-O-S-M-I-N, which is the chemical compound that produces petrichor.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh.
Peter Sokolowski: It's the smell of the earth, the smell of wet earth, essentially. There are so many, and, you know, I noticed again, what we've done in this instance, using our data, there was kind of a convention for dictionaries generally. It was certainly for Merriam-Webster to save space by not entering inflected forms. So, for example, we can now say that "dismayed" as a past form, or "empowered" as a past tense. Those are forms that are very frequently used. In other words, they don't need to be defined as "empower" or "dismayed." They can have their own definitions, and now they do.Â
And so, I see things like "expedited" and "exhausted," "flattering," that are new to print dictionaries because of a new policy. We basically recognize that if these are inflected forms of verbs, yes, they're defined at the verb, but then you have to extrapolate the adjective, or the adjectival form or the inflected form.
So we basically have created entries with their own place definitions for forms that formerly were not defined. And it's just a subtle thing; it's kind of an inside baseball lexicography thing. But it's something that makes me realize that data helps us do our research by recognizing that a word like "dismayed" is found very frequently in that form. And maybe it should be found that way in the dictionary too.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, no, that's very interesting. Sometimes I have looked up inflected forms and been disappointed that there wasn't a separate definition or a pronunciation. Sometimes the pronunciation is tricky. Yeah, and you know, another thing that I love that's in the print dictionary are the line drawings. They're very, I'm so glad that you kept some of those.
Peter Sokolowski: Oh yeah. And you know, Merriam has always kept them as drawings. We've never used photographs. In other words, or I shouldn't say we never; we haven't used photographs in almost a hundred years. If you look at, especially the editions right behind me from the 1930s, they did have plates of photographs of airplanes and automobiles. And boy, nothing dates faster than an old car. And in a sense now, it's a charming part of those old editions. But,what we recognize that those illustrations are really most useful for the things that are hard to discriminate with words. And what do I mean by that?Â
It's hard to discriminate if you describe with words what a dog breed looks like. If you had your eyes closed, you might think of a couple of different dog breeds. And it's a lot easier to just see, "Oh, that's a spaniel, that's a Labrador." The same goes for the shapes of leaves, the shapes of flowers, the shapes of trees, and the shapes of articles of clothing, especially historical articles of clothing, and, of course, architectural elements. So that you could have something that says it's a kind of style of roof. You know, but then when you see it, you think, "Oh, I know exactly what that is," and it reminds me of Tudor England. Or the rough, the kind of collar you realize, okay, once you see it, you blink once and you know what it is. It takes a lot of words to get there. We have found that it's those kinds of things, and also, by the way, shapes of birds and butterflies. So, those are the kinds of things that we tend to privilege, and tools too.
I said I shouldn't say "tools," and when I think about that, I also recognize that tools shouldn't be shown in total isolation. Like musical instruments. If you show, you know, what an oboe looks like, you can say, "Well, first of all, is it waist high? Is it as tall as a person?" You have to see a person with it and preferably holding it and playing it. So you recognize, "Oh, it's the kind of thing where you hold it with two hands. It has, you know, and there's a reed that goes in your mouth." So those kinds of things maybe you haven't thought of before, but really they're all shown to orient the object that's being defined to give information that it might take another hundred or two hundred words to convey.
Mignon Fogarty: So the picture actually saves space by conveying what would have taken so many words. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah.
Peter Sokolowski: Because you can orient with a genus term. You can say a woodwind musical instrument or whatever, but the fact is a transverse flute is very different from a recorder. Let's see those images. And you can really get a long way in the kind of lexical discrimination with a quick image and a well-chosen illustration.
Mignon Fogarty: Fascinating. Well, you know, since Squiggly and Aardvark are big characters in my podcast, I'm a fan of the aardvark drawing. And, yeah. And then, Linux cast on Mastodon had a question about the word aardvark. They wanted to know why it has two A's, like what is the purpose of that second A.
Peter Sokolowski: Right. Well, I mean, it's peculiar. I mean, the premise of the question is it's a peculiar spelling in the English language, and that's because it's not an English word. It has its origins in Dutch. And in Dutch, as you probably know, there's a lot of double vowels. And it came really from Afrikaans, which is a language that derived originally from Dutch. So it's basically a Dutch transliteration that we are seeing in English, and that's why it's an unusual spelling for an English word. Dutch, of course, is a first cousin to English as a Germanic language, and has a rhythm and stress pattern that resembles English more than most other languages. But it does have those unusual spellings, and we reflect that in some words in English.
Mignon Fogarty: And another question that came in is how do you know when to stop? You know, first of all, I'd love to know how many, it sounds like an enormous undertaking, proofing all those entries. So I'd love to know how many people worked on that. But then, who was it? Musty Bitz McGee on Mastodon wanted to know how you know when to stop, because it seems like the research on dictionary entries is pretty open-ended. So how do you know when a word is, you know, quote unquote done?
Peter Sokolowski: That's a terrific question. The premise is excellent. And you know, it makes me think of, you know, kind of another metaphor. You know, when you are painting the Golden Gate Bridge, by the time you finish the coat, you're ready to start the back where you began. That's absolutely true. Ask anyone at the Oxford English Dictionary where they are under continual revision, as we are.
So the fact is, if a word... if we, you know, we're looking at a synchronic tradition. The Webster tradition has always been a synchronic tradition, and that means like synchronicity or synchronized, a snapshot of the current active vocabulary of American English. And that really was Noah Webster's mission almost 200 years ago. And it's still our mission today. And I say that kind of to give a footnote to what the Oxford English Dictionary is and what it isn't. It is a diachronic dictionary, so dia across time, a thousand years of English. That priority to all of those forms, whereas the Webster tradition has always been a synchronic tradition. So we want to take a snapshot of the active use of language. So that's one way that we can reduce things.Â
We have about 30 to 35 people who worked on this edition, which is still a pretty big staff. And I'm proud of us. For the proofing stage, it's all hands on deck. It doesn't matter what your day job is, we all have to do proofreading. And I remember when we did it for the 11th collegiate, that was still in print. Those were the blue lines. If you work in publishing, the blues that smell like gasoline come in from the typesetter. You’d mark everything, which included dust marks. That might be a blot on the page that you weren't sure if it was going to be reflected on the printed page or not. So you marked it and made sure they checked that plate. And now, of course, it's digitally typeset, so we can print them. And we did, by the way, all print these to proof them on paper and not just on screen. We did a lot on screen as well. But you know, this is now a kind of hybrid product. So a hybrid process.Â
You know, there is no real easy way to figure out when we're done. I remember a colleague who used to say, it's time to declare victory and leave the field. The fact is, we actually draw a hard line under the research and basically say the proposals for new entries stop now. The research for new entries stops a few months later. The etymology and dating and phonetics for those new entries stop a few months later. There's always this lag time. And so we do have to draw a line in the sand and say, you know, it's too late now to propose a new entry. That was done. We had a couple of years to do that, and of course, we have a long backlog, 22 years' worth of new work that has appeared online and in some cases, online only, that we can now present in print.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Wonderful. Well, because you mentioned the Oxford English Dictionary, it's a good time to ask Dr. Jonathan Downey's question. He said, “Do you ever get together with the people who compile the Oxford English Dictionary?” And I know you do, but he said, “If the two dictionary-making teams played against each other in a chess match, who would win?”
Peter Sokolowski: Well, I'm sure OED would win. And my good friend Peter Gilliveri is at OED. He kind of has a similar position to mine in the sense that part of his job is to tell the story of the Oxford English Dictionary. He wrote a magnificent 600-page book, which is called “The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary,” from the Oxford University Press. A great book that really has, you know, almost terrifying detail, but a book for people who are into dictionaries. Their staff is bigger, of course. And they are all technically a department of the University of Oxford, so it's a different business model as well.Â
We are friends, and we used to see each other at conferences. I've been to Oxford a few times, had the great privilege of Peter's company. I usually take him for a drink or for dinner. I've heard him rehearse with the Oxford Bach choir, which just makes me think spontaneously of if you've ever watched Inspector Morse, who was a character in Oxford, and also sang in a kind of amateur semi-pro choir. I have walked by the church and heard the choir rehearse from the outside, and I thought, this is just like being in a TV show. But Peter Gilliver is a dedicated and excellent singer. But he's also brought me down to their archive to look at what they call the quotations, the handwritten documents that were the basis, the raw form of the research for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. And he showed me the entry for the word “unabridged,” which was drafted. The definition and the Oxford English Dictionary for the word “unabridged” is “A copy of Webster's unabridged dictionary.” So I was happy that he showed me that little kind of tip of the hat to one another. Two different dictionary traditions.
Mignon Fogarty: I love that history so much. That's so great. You know, well, I think we'll wrap up with some more philosophical questions.So we'll end with some more philosophical questions. So, Like and Lick on Mastodon asked, “Have you received any pressure to change definitions in any way for political reasons?” And then another question from Mor Phil Any, also on Mastodon, was, “Is post-truth society also affecting dictionaries and their roles in society?” So like how are you fitting into the culture as a dictionary and what kind of pressure do you feel?
Peter Sokolowski: Well, I mean, there's always pressure and there always has been, and that, you know, language is inherently political. The dictionary is not a legal document. The dictionary is a cultural document, and our mission is to tell the truth about words. The dictionary doesn't work unless we are objective and neutral from our perspective.
And that's one of the most important things that we try to be. And we work all day, every day to achieve that. The fact is, too, though, I think the dictionary has always served this role as a public utility. I never saw that more clearly than in March of 2020 when our lookup data was not just a lot of words about the medical and political and emergency social ramifications of lockdown. All of the lookups, the top 50, the top 100, every single word... It was very moving to see that the people turned to the dictionary, in a sense, for stability and for comfort. But most importantly for information, and some of that information is urgent and medical. Some of that information was maybe less urgent, but more poignant for me. I noticed that in the top 20 words that were looked up was the word “cancel,” because think of how many handwritten letters or posters were made with the word canceled at that time.
And I think people just wanted to know. Is there one L or are there two Ls in cancelled? And that's what a dictionary is for too, but what we recognize through our data is that people use the dictionary for mechanical reasons, like spelling, for lexical reasons, like new words, but also for encyclopedic reasons. For what does this phenomenon represent? How can we address it? How can I use it as a beginning of contemplation? It's clear to me that the dictionary is used for all of those purposes, and it, I think, always has been, but now we can see it in our data. That proves to me that what we do matters. That words matter, that people pay attention.Â
Sometimes people, you know, mistake us for the government or for the law. We are certainly cited in legal cases very frequently, as you probably know, and more frequently than ever, because there are fewer dictionaries that are actively revised. So the fact is we take our job seriously as we always have, and maybe even more seriously when we see that, yes, there is a war on facts. There's a war on science. There's a war on ideas. We don't believe in censorship of any kind, because that's hiding the truth. And so we want to make sure that the dictionary is always telling the truth about words for everybody.
Mignon Fogarty: Right, and I mean, you've gotten in trouble, quote unquote, in the past for including words that people thought shouldn't be included, whether it's from something offensive or something like, “irregardless.”
Peter Sokolowski: Right, right. And that, and what I love about that is that it shows a passion about language that people care. And, you know, there have been controversies about dictionaries and we know a lot about that. A lot of those controversies, yes, are about the nature of authority, the nature of language.
And those are a little bit different from political questions. But we take them just as seriously and we have very good answers for those. And I think "irregardless" is a great example to use to explain to someone how a word gets into the dictionary. It's in the dictionary just because it's in print. And if it never occurred in print, it would never be in the dictionary. So that shows the relationship between our research and our publications that we base our entries on what we find in print, and we therefore have to report whether we like it or not of what we find.
Mignon Fogarty: All right. Well, thank you so much, Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at Merriam-Webster. This is the new print 12th edition of the Collegiate Dictionary. And actually, it just came out on November 18th. So, you know, we talked about how it makes a great book. You still have time to get it for your holiday gift giving, and a big five-pound book would wrap up really nicely. Peter, thank you so much for being here.
Peter Sokolowski: It's always a treat, Mignon. Thanks so much for asking.