By definition, dictionaries full of meaning
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — Merriam-Webster, the oldest dictionary publisher in America, has turned itself into a social-media powerhouse in the past few years.
Its editors star in online videos on hot-button topics such as the serial comma, gender pronouns and the dreaded “irregardless.”
Its Twitter feed has become a viral sensation, offering witty — and sometimes pointedly political — commentary on the news of the day.
Kory Stamper, a MerriamWebster lexicographer, is very much part of the vanguard of word-nerd celebrities.
Her witty “Ask the Editor” video contributions — such as a classic on the plural of octopus — and her personal blog, Harmless Drudgery, have inspired a Kory Stamper Fan Club on Facebook.
But the company remains very much a bricks-andmortar operation, still based in Springfield, Massachusetts, where the Merriam brothers bought the rights to Noah Webster’s dictionary in the 1840s and carried on his idea of a distinctly American language.
And last month, Stamper, the author of the new book “Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries,” was eager to provide a tour of some of the distinctly analog oddities in the basement.
She offered a glimpse of the dungeonlike storage room used as a podcast studio and cheerfully pointed out some of the creepier company heirlooms, such as mangy historical dioramas donated by local schoolchildren and an inflatable dictionary with arms and legs, created for a long-ago promotional campaign.
But the real jaw-dropper was the Backward Index, which includes some 315,000 cards listing words spelled ... backward.
“It was conceived of as another way of shuffling information,” Stamper said of the index, which seems to have been produced intermittently from the 1930s to the ‘70s. “Basically, someone sat here and typed up all the entries backwards. And then went crazy.”
Craziness is a bit of a leitmotif in “Word by Word.” The book, published last month by Pantheon, mixes memoiristic meditations on the lexicographic life with a detailed description of the brain-twisting work of writing dictionaries.
Stamper calls it “a love letter to dictionaries in English,” if one that allows for mixed feelings.
“People have so many fears about what their use of language says about them,” she said. “When you talk to people about dictionaries, they often start talking about other things, like which words they love, and which words they hate. And it’s
perfectly fine to hate parts of the language.”
Stamper, 42, grew up in Colorado and majored in medieval studies at Smith College in Massachusetts. When she interviewed at Merriam-Webster in 1998, she was puzzled to learn that the job involved writing definitions.
“I just thought, ‘Why would you need to do that?’” she recalled. “Hasn’t the dictionary already been written?”
“‘Word by Word” describes her initiation into the art of lexicography, which involves wrestling with the continuous evolution of language. She walks the reader, chapter by chapter, through different aspects of a definition, including grammar, pronunciation and etymology.
Stamper’s job is a rarity: As printed dictionaries give way to online dictionaries, many of them free, only about 50 lexicographers work at dictionary companies in the United States, she estimated.
Still, she thinks the work remains as vital as it was in Noah Webster’s day.
“There’s something to having a bunch of nerds sitting in an office dispassionately reading lots and lots of material and distilling the meaning of a word as it’s been used in lots of places,” she said. “It really is this weird democratic process.”