Unabridged: A Book about the Past, Present, and Future of the Dictionary

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Word Freak, a vibrant, lively, and illuminating journey through the exotic world of Merriam-Webster, dictionaries, and language, at a time of rapid-fire change in the way we create, consume, define, and use words

Words are the currency of culture—and never more than today. From selfie to doomscrolling to rizz, our hyper-connected digital world coins and spreads new words with lightning speed and locks them into mainstream consciousness with unprecedented influence. Journalist and bestselling author Stefan Fatsis embedded as a lexicographer-in-training at America’s most famous dictionary publisher, Merriam-Webster, to learn how words get into the dictionary, where they come from, who decides what they mean, and how we write and think about them. In so doing, as he recounts in Unabridged, he discovered the history and fascinating subculture of the dictionary and of those who curate and revere “one of the most basic features of our collective humanity.”

Fatsis reveals the little-known story of how the brothers George and Charles Merriam acquired Noah Webster’s original American dictionary and reshaped the business of language forever. Merriam-Webster became America’s most successful and enduring compendium of words, withstanding intense competition and cultural controversies—only to be threatened by the power of Google and artificial intelligence today.

Delving into Merriam’s legendary archives and parsing its arcane rules, Fatsis learns the painstaking precision required for writing good definitions. He examines how the dictionary has handled the most explosive slurs and the revolutionary change in pronouns. He votes on the annual Word of the Year, travels to the legendary Oxford English Dictionary, and visits the world’s greatest private dictionary collection in a Greenwich Village apartment stuffed with more than 20,000 books. Fatsis demonstrates how words are weaponized in our polarized political culture—from liberal to woke to DEI—and, in a time of insurrections and pandemics, how they can be a literal matter of life and death. Along the way, he manages to write a few definitions that crack the code and are enshrined in the pixelated dictionary.

“I fell in love with the dictionary on my eleventh birthday,” Fatsis writes about the full-color college lexicon he received on that day. “The dictionary projects permanence, but the language is Jell-O, slippery and mutable and forever collapsing on itself.” Unabridged takes readers to the heart of an industry in flux, celebrating as it does the sheer thrill and wonder of words.