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In 2015<\/span>, I settled in at the Springfield, Massachusetts, headquarters of Merriam-Webster, America\u2019s most storied dictionary company. My project was to document the ambitious reinvention of a classic, and I hoped to get some definitions of my own into the lexicon along the way. (A favorite early drafting effort, which I couldn\u2019t believe wasn\u2019t already included, was dogpile\u200a: \u201ca celebration in which participants dive on top of each other immediately after a victory.\u201d) Merriam-Webster\u2019s overhaul of its signature work, Webster\u2019s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged\u2014a 465,000-word, 2,700-page, 13.5-pound doorstop published in 1961 and never before updated\u2014was already in full swing. The revision, which would be not a hardback book but an online-only edition, requiring a subscription, was expected to take decades.<\/p>\n Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.<\/p>\n View More<\/p>\n Not long after my arrival, though, everything changed. Page views were declining for Merriam-Webster.com, the company\u2019s free, ad-driven revenue engine: Tweaks to Google\u2019s algorithms had punished Merriam\u2019s search results. The company had always been lean and profitable, but the financial hit was real. Merriam\u2019s parent, Encyclopedia Britannica, was facing challenges of its own\u2014who needed an encyclopedia in a Wikipedia world?\u2014and ordered cuts. Merriam laid off more than a dozen staffers. Its longtime publisher, John Morse, was forced into early retirement. The revision of Merriam\u2019s unabridged masterpiece was abandoned.<\/p>\n Call it the paradox of the modern dictionary. We\u2019re in a golden age for the study and appreciation of words\u2014a time of \u201cmeta awareness\u201d of language, as one lexicographer put it to me. Dictionaries are more accessible than ever, available on your laptop or phone. More people use them than ever, and dictionary publishers now possess the digital wherewithal to closely track that use. Podcasts, newsletters, and Words of the Year have popularized neologisms, etymologies, and usage trends. Meanwhile, analytical software has revolutionized linguistic inquiry, enabling greater understanding of the ways language works\u2014when, how, and why words break out; the specific contexts for expressions and idioms. And all of that was true long before the rise of AI.<\/p>\n But these advances are also strangling the business of the dictionary. Definitions, professional and amateur, are a click away, and most people don\u2019t care or can\u2019t tell whether what pops up in a search is expert research, crowdsourced jottings, scraped data, or zombie websites. Before he left Merriam, Morse told me that legacy dictionaries face the same growing popular distrust of traditional authorities that media and government have encountered.<\/p>\n Other big names in American lexicography were already receding. In 2001, a decade after releasing an edition dubbed the \u201cpolitically correct dictionary\u201d for its inclusion of womyn, herstory, waitron, and more, Random House abandoned dictionary making altogether. Webster\u2019s New World Dictionary cycled through corporate owners until its last edition, in 2014. The American Heritage Dictionary, published in 1969 to challenge Merriam\u2019s Third, is an infrequently updated shell of its legendary self.<\/p>\n By the start of this decade, the once-competitive American dictionary business was essentially down to two players: Merriam-Webster, with its 200 years of tradition and brand recognition, and Dictionary.com, whose founders, 30 years ago, beat Merriam to the URL by a few weeks. After it was acquired in 2008 by the media and internet giant IAC, Dictionary.com\u2019s small editorial staff had innovated. When I visited its offices in 2016, the company\u2019s verticals for slang, emoji, memes, and terms related to gender and sexuality were robust, and its periodic dictionary updates were trendy and substantial\u2014a batch of entries included superfood and clicktivism. The company reportedly had more than 5 billion annual searches in the mid-2010s, and in 2018 was among the internet\u2019s 500 most-visited websites.<\/p>\n In 2018, Dictionary.com was purchased by the mortgage-industry titan (and Cleveland Cavaliers owner) Dan Gilbert\u2019s company Rock Holdings\u2014apparently just because Gilbert was a fan of dictionaries. He took a personal interest in the project, and for a few years, it seemed like the digital future of the lexicon was at hand. The line inside the company was that Gilbert wanted \u201cto own the English language.\u201d And he did seem genuinely interested in the work of the dictionary. \u201cEvery so often he would ask a question that a reader might ask,\u201d John Kelly, a longtime Dictionary.com editor, told me. For instance, Gilbert was into extreme weather, Kelly said, and had subordinates brief him on terms such as bombogenesis. When Rock Holdings\u2019 mortgage and financial companies went public in 2020, Dictionary.com remained privately held, shielding the site from shareholder pressures.<\/p>\n In 2023, Dictionary.com hired three full-time veteran lexicographers\u2014including Grant Barrett, a co-host of the public-radio show A Way With Words, and Kory Stamper, a former longtime Merriam-Webster editor and the author of the memoir Word by Word\u2014to bolster a team of about a dozen freelancers. The goal was to modernize the dictionary, which was a gigantic undertaking. Dictionary.com was based primarily on The Random House Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (published in 1966, updated in 1987), which was based on The New Century Dictionary (published in 1927), which was based on The Century Dictionary (published in 1889), which was based on The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language (published in 1847). Some of the entries were more than 100 years old.<\/p>\n The lexicography team revised frequently viewed terms such as theory and hypothesis, which generate lots of traffic at the start of the school year. It enhanced entries with new pronunciations, etymologies, and alternative senses, such as a new adjectival use of mid (\u201cmediocre, unimpressive, or disappointing\u201d). It removed sexist and archaic language and diversified names in example sentences. (\u201c\u200a\u2018John went to school,\u2019\u200a\u201d Barrett told me. \u201cWhy not Juan or Juanita or Giannis? This is a multicultural society.\u201d)<\/p>\n Barrett designed a reading program to help flag emerging lexical items and turbocharge additions, tripling the volume of new words added in the site\u2019s periodic updates over the course of a year. A February 2024 rollout included Barbiecore, bed rotting, slow fashion, range anxiety, and enshittification, which the American Dialect Society had chosen a month earlier as its 2023 Word of the Year. (Of those words, only enshittification has since been added by Merriam, and only to a new slang portal, not the official dictionary.) The lexicography team was revising a database to more quickly update entries and post them on social media, and developing a synonym-based game. It was training new lexicographers.<\/p>\n Dictionary.com couldn\u2019t match Merriam\u2019s history or reputation. Instead, the company was trying to position itself to \u201ccapture language at the pace of change,\u201d to be \u201chipper and more experimental, but also rigorous AF,\u201d Kelly said. (Dictionary.com added the slang initialism for as fuck\u200a; Merriam still has not.)<\/p>\n The piecemeal efforts improved the dictionary\u2019s quality and cool quotient. Barrett also loved the work: He was surrounded by colleagues who cared about language and how it was presented, verbally and visually. For a time, Barrett could plug his fingers in his ears and tune out the sobering reality: Although he and his colleagues were getting paid well, \u201cthe dictionary business was crumbling,\u201d he said. \u201cSo ride it \u2019til the wheels fall off. And the wheels fell off.\u201d<\/p>\n Not long <\/span>after <\/span>Rock Holdings took over, the industry grew more challenging. Google\u2019s \u201cknowledge boxes\u201d were hogging the top of search pages with definitions licensed from the British dictionary publisher Oxford, including synonyms, antonyms, and, eventually and predictably, AI-generated summaries of words\u2019 meanings. The proprietary clutter pushed down traditional-dictionary links, and Dictionary .com\u2019s traffic fell by about 40 percent. At the same time, the pandemic drained advertising revenue. The site tried to stanch the decline with more ads, only to create a worse user experience.<\/p>\nExplore the October 2025 Issue<\/h2>\n