The Making of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Twelfth Edition

Hosted by Emily Brewster and Peter Sokolowski.

With many thanks to New England Public Media for the use of their studios, and deep appreciation for our producer, John Voci.

Download the episode here.

Transcript

Emily Brewster: Welcome to a special episode of Word Matters. Peter Sokolowski and I are here today with three special guests from Merriam-Webster. We have Em Vezina, Senior Director of Editorial Operations; Karen Wilkinson, Director of Defining; and Linda Wood, Director of Print Products. And the occasion for this special episode is the very recent publication, as of November 18th, 2025, of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 12th Edition. Welcome to all of you.

Linda Wood: Thank you.

Karen Wilkinson: Thank you.

Em Vezina: Thank you.

Peter Sokolowski: It's a great occasion, and we actually have a print copy that we can open right now.

Emily Brewster: And this really is a novelty. We're not just staging this. I only got my first copy today.

Linda Wood: And isn't it pretty.

Karen Wilkinson: Whoa.

Peter Sokolowski: The first thing people notice is the thumb notches, and I think people love that. It kind of says “dictionary” to everybody. And it also tells me that this is a kind of piece of technology that really still works. You can find a word in four or five seconds, partly because you know exactly alphabetically, roughly, where you're looking. I think we forget that the book is important technology. We certainly found a good form for the dictionary.

And maybe the question we begin with is why print? Why now? Obviously there's a legacy. This is the 12th edition, and this is an important part of the history of Merriam-Webster, but just desk dictionaries are kind of what everybody has at home and at the office and at school. Maybe you got a Collegiate dictionary when you graduated from high school. Many people did. I think I did. The Collegiate used to have a page in the front that was a dedication that allowed you to write, "This is given on this date for this reason." We stopped that after a while, but it was there for decades, and I think that people have a personal relationship with this particular dictionary more, maybe, than any other.

Linda Wood: I think that's one of the reasons for printing it again now, after so many years. It's something we've always done. We continue to print dictionaries as we always have, but the Collegiate took a little while longer. We were busy doing other things, working mostly on our very popular website. And we found the opportunity to take what we learned from the website and put it back into our traditional print form.

Emily Brewster: The very first Collegiate dictionary was published, I think, in 1898. Is that right? Do we all agree on that year?

Peter Sokolowski: Yes.

Emily Brewster: Yes. And this, the one that just came out, is the 12th.

Peter Sokolowski: And what does a new edition of the Collegiate mean? Why the number 12? What does that indicate?

Linda Wood: For the 11th, let's say, we had been updating it, but updating means you're adding some new material, you're touching some pages, but not everything. When we do a new edition, it's thorough. We touch almost everything in the book, which means reviewing, putting in new material, taking out some or updating much.

Peter Sokolowski: And that means not just new words, but new senses of existing words and maybe, for example, revised etymological dating. We can antedate, as we say, put the first known use of a given word back, in some cases by a couple of centuries, and that's exciting research that accumulates over time. And really, that's really what the 12th represents to me is the accumulated revisions of a long time.

Emily Brewster: This 12th edition, again, a complete departure from the 11th edition, which we have been updating regularly, as we always do. I'm really interested in what it was like for the three of you, as longtime Merriam-Webster editors, to get to create a new Collegiate dictionary, because it looks new. It does not look like the old one, and it feels new, and it's a different size. And I want to hear how the three of you made the decisions that resulted in this book.

Em Vezina: It was awesome. I don't know. For me—

Linda Wood: It was very exciting.

Em Vezina: Yeah.

Karen Wilkinson: It was amazing.

Linda Wood: When we first found out that we were actually going to do this, what a moment. We were like, "We're going to stop everything else and work on a Collegiate. We haven't done this in 20 years."

Emily Brewster: What were your priorities in thinking about what the 12th Collegiate would be?

Linda Wood: I think one of the most important things to us was actually what it looked like, and I'm talking about the interior pages, because, with print, you have only so much space, and we knew we wanted it to be more legible, more pleasing to look at. That was a big hurdle, actually, to be able to put all we wanted in it, but make it more airy.

Peter Sokolowski: Easier to read.

Linda Wood: Yes, absolutely.

Karen Wilkinson: Peter, you've talked about how past Collegiates were workhorses.

Peter Sokolowski: Yes.

Karen Wilkinson: They were utilitarian. They were practical. They crammed as much information as possible onto the print page. The modern workhorse is our online dictionary.

Peter Sokolowski: That's right.

Karen Wilkinson: So, people seek out print dictionaries for different reasons, often for gifting as we've discussed, but also for the love of the print page. People want to unplug, take their beautiful print dictionary and whatever they're reading and sit down and enjoy the experience. So we set out to make this a really beautiful book, a wonderful tactile experience, and to make it very browsable so that people could enjoy discovering new things.

Peter Sokolowski: All of those are new qualities for a Merriam-Webster Collegiate, which really was a workhorse, and it was... If you look at an older one, a 9th or a 10th or 11th especially, the pages were not only crammed with text, they were actually the most densely printed pages in all of American book publishing, so much so that the lines between the letters were themselves shorter than the letters themselves, which in printing terms is called negative leading, lead meaning the lead spacers that had been used in type setting. The pages clearly are more open, and they're a little whiter. They're a little easier to read. The typeface is bigger. Can you tell us more about the choices of those typefaces in bold versus Roman, and also what the typeface is?

Em Vezina: Sure. One of the things that was really fun is that the three of us took a field trip to Barnes & Noble, and we knew we wanted to create something that felt more luxurious. That's always the word that I use thinking about this book. It's something that feels luxurious to use, that's a pleasure to look at and to touch and to explore.

So, we took this field trip, and we looked at different sizes. We looked at cover materials. We looked at different types of paper. We went through a lot of Bibles looking for what is the thinnest paper with the best opacity and what we might be able to use, and it was really neat. So, we picked out all these different books, and we landed on this size. We knew we wanted to explore potentially making the book larger because one of the things that we were always thinking about is how do we take a website and fit it into a book? This website that has no space limitations, how do we stuff that into something someone can hold? So, we wanted to use a larger size, a thicker book, more pages, and it was neat.

And I think that the book, because of the fact that it's not the workhorse that the previous editions have been, it didn't need to be portable in the same way. So, we knew we could take up more space and create something that people were not going to be carrying around with them. And also, I believe that the larger size reflects the gravity of the book. From my perspective, it is a better physical manifestation of the amount of information and the quality of the information that we're providing people. So, we fell in love with the size and when we showed it to the marketing and sales, everybody, right away, I think was pretty much on board with this larger size.

So, then, for the pages themselves, we wanted that spaciousness. So, the columns are relatively wide. And there's only a certain amount of words per column that the human eye and brain can really follow, so we pretty much maxed that out with what is reasonable. And we chose a new font for the definition text. The font is called Arno Pro. And—

Emily Brewster: Can you spell that?

Em Vezina: A-R-N-O.

Emily Brewster: Okay.

Em Vezina: So, Arno space Pro. And it's a serifed font, and the serifs help your eye to move along. That is the general design, when it comes to font design. In some ways, the sans serif font... So, we use Helvetica for the headwords and for the bold text, and in a lot of ways, that's a more modern look. It stands out more to your eye in certain ways, but it doesn't exactly help the flow of moving across a wide line of text. So, we liked the Arno Pro because it has a little more personality than the font that we have used for, I don't know, many, many decades. And it has a little more personality, a little more classiness, I think. And it also fits a little bit more across the line, so helpful for fitting more information in.

So, we have these wide lines, these wide columns, but they're spaced out vertically now. So we needed more pages. We needed larger pages in order to make that happen. And we used little icons in a way that—

Peter Sokolowski: Yes.

Em Vezina: ... previous editions had not. We have a little diamond that indicates supplementary information notes. We have a magnifying glass that indicates the top lookups. So, there's a little more design to this book than the previous editions.

Peter Sokolowski: Yeah, there's more literal iconography on the page. And it is true. It's a little bit more imposing. If you're familiar with desk dictionaries of the last 50, 60 years, this is a little thicker, a little taller, a little bigger, but it's also prettier. It's got this red linen cover with a gold embossed circle, the famous bullseye circle, the Merriam-Webster logo, but also those thumb tabs that people love. It's a book lover's book.

Linda Wood: We have to give credit to Miles Kronby, our Chief Product Officer. He originally had the vision of making it an authoritative source, as it always has been, but also just a beautiful object. And he said that many times, and the kind of book you want to have visible. And you can put it on your bookshelf. It's beautiful. You can take it down and use it. It's useful and beautiful. So, it is a book for word lovers, language lovers, and book lovers.

Peter Sokolowski: A person who's going to buy a print dictionary in 2026 is someone who loves books already, so we already kind of can go that distance. I'm so glad that he had that vision because it also has the speckled edges. There are things about this that recall the heritage of the product, but it is a new product. It has new research.

I also kind of think that one big book that looks like a dictionary is also kind of the Merriams’ innovation because dictionaries, in Europe, were almost always two volumes. The French Academy, and the German, and certainly Samuel Johnson's and Noah Webster's own dictionary, they were in two big volumes. But then when the Merriams took over, they said, "It's a lot easier to sell one widget than two," and they set the dictionary into smaller letters and put them in one single A to Z section and then stamped a word that was never part of the title. But to assure the consumer that they were getting the complete product, they stamped the word unabridged on the side and they were the first people to use that word, as well. Later that became part of the official title, but that was never Webster's title. It was just to assure the consumer that they were getting one big book that looked like this does.

Em Vezina: Peter, was Merriam-Webster the first dictionary company to create a portable, like …

Peter Sokolowski: No, there were always abridgments, mostly because they sold better, and they could carry them. There were always abridgments, but this idea of making a standard size that became the standard bestselling hardcover book, after the Bible, in American publishing history. Which is, all by itself, a piece of the culture, and so it has this place in many people's minds.

And I remember when I started going into the public to conferences and trade shows, I felt like I was getting the reflected goodwill that people had because they have a personal relationship with their dictionary, for many good reasons, and all of us probably have that. And now we've brought that up to date.

Emily Brewster: So, we've talked about the details of what the book looks like and the decisions that went into that process, and I'm sure that we could actually do an entire episode about that, but let's talk more about what the content is. We've all been writing dictionaries for a long time now. And as, Karen, I think you alluded to, we were trying to put the online dictionary into a book form. The online dictionary, Merriam-Webster.com, when you go there, you are looking at what is now a very modified version of the 11th Collegiate Dictionary because since that edition came out, we have been working very hard on the Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. We also spent some years updating the Unabridged Dictionary website, also. So, now, for this project, we had to decide how to go back to a book form from the website.

Linda Wood: Yeah, we initially started the way we always would, which is to take the previous edition and start editing it, and we did some sampling. And it just was not going to work for our budget and our time constraints, frankly. And one day, Karen had this epiphany and said, "Why don't we take the website and see if we can put it into print form?" And I have to say, I was extremely skeptical. However, Karen and Em were able to figure out a way, I think that they did most of that, to do that.

Karen Wilkinson: Well, I think we had all started out assuming that it would be impossible to do because we had done so much expansion on the website version. Em, you had talked about how a very serious decision was made sometime back to split the data apart. And you don't think about this, but underlying each modern dictionary is a set of data, usually tagged data. And depending on the dictionary, the structure can be quite different and it is difficult to reconcile one with another.

Emily Brewster: So, Karen, are you saying that we had book data for C11 to abbreviate? We don't always call it the 10th Collegiate, 11th Collegiate. We usually say C11. So, this new book that just came out is C12. There is data that is the underlayment of C11, as it exists, and then we also had the Merriam-Webster.com dictionary and that data, and what you're saying is that we had to find a way...

Em Vezina: Merriam-Webster.com had been C11. And then at some point there were these minor enhancements to that data that were intended for online use only, but because of that, they couldn't be inside the entry. They had to be stuck at the end of the entry because that was the only way to remove them in order to use that data still for the book. And that was a major decision back around 2015, 2016. When we stopped working on the Unabridged and started working on the online dictionary, it was a very weighty decision to split this into two separate files. And one became only for print and ended up kind of sitting and stagnating a little bit. And then one became the online dictionary, and that just was blown wide open. And it allowed us to do so much more, and it became what the website is today.

And part of that decision was the knowledge at that time that once you do that, this online version will never be a book. Right?

But when we update the Collegiate, now we have to do that separately. We've touched tens of thousands of entries. Close to a hundred thousand entries we've edited on the website, and the knowledge is always that you could never do all of that for the book.

Emily Brewster: People who have listened to this podcast before have heard Peter and Ammon and me talking about what you can do in an online dictionary that you cannot do in a print dictionary and just what an enormous departure it is. You can expand abbreviations. You can make your definitions as long as you want to. As long as it's helpful, you can add all kinds of examples. So, the Merriam-Webster.com dictionary, by the time we got to this project, it was very different from the data file that it had started as, that was C11.

Linda Wood: It's a completely different mindset. When you're working in print, the idea is, "Keep it succinct. Keep it short. You only have so much space," and the mindset for online is, "Do whatever you want. You have almost unlimited space."

Karen Wilkinson: We can focus more on making it helpful.

Linda Wood: Right, right, you can add so much more.

Peter Sokolowski: The other problem that is encountered with an online dictionary is that entries are often viewed in isolation. So, not only do we have more space, but sometimes it actually requires more space to make an entry self-sufficient, to have it be self-explanatory, to give its own grammar, its own examples. That wasn't true in a print dictionary where, for example, the adjective or the adverb form of another entry could just be indicated by its spelling. Add an L-Y, and now you have the adverb. But if that's promoted to its own entry status, which sometimes they are, now you need a lot more information. It has to be a more robust entry.

So, it is a completely different project. So, now, the idea is kind of turning the mirror backwards, turning it around and saying, "Now, let's make this a print book." It was counterintuitive and honestly hadn't occurred to anyone to do it this way. And also, we're probably the first print dictionary program to have this revolution of informing our revisions with data, expressing those revisions online, and then turning them into a book.

Karen Wilkinson: Em and our data specialist, Anne McDonald, worked many long hours figuring out this process, which is incredibly complicated. I'll let Em talk about that, but I did want to mention that when we talk about expanding abbreviations, you think, "Oh, so they expanded N to noun." That doesn't seem like a big deal. Well, there are over 200 different abbreviations—

Peter Sokolowski: Oh, god.

Karen Wilkinson: ... that we use in our entries, and all of those had to be expanded for the online version, and the vast majority had to be unexpanded for C12.

Em Vezina: It was just the right moment at the right time to bring up that idea again. We've been dismissing this idea and saying, "It's impossible to create a book from the website, and you nailed it," and it was thrilling. I still remember that moment, and I started talking to Anne McDonald, our data specialist, and it took five months to create the data.

So, the two of us worked on it for five months, figuring out what are the things that we want to recreate the same way as C11? What print conventions do we want to retain? And what aspects do we want to do differently also, right? That was a big question of, what do we want to do in a new way? What aspects of the dictionary are worth the space and should not be abbreviated or reduced? So, there was a lot of discussion, there were a lot of questions, and then there's a lot of thought of simply, what are we able to do? So, what can we do programmatically versus what things have to be done by hand by editors? And how long will those things take? So, there was a lot of thought that went into it and a lot of trial and error, and it took about five full months of a lot of conversations and a lot of long, long phone calls between me and Anne sitting and just pecking away at the data. And there were hundreds of different aspects to tweak. And in addition to the actual literal abbreviations, there were many other space-saving features. We went online. We had expanded the variant label also, or less commonly, to help users see this is a variant, but it's not a common variant. And—

Emily Brewster: By variant, you mean a different way to style the word, a different spelling or a slightly different version of a word.

Em Vezina: Exactly.

Emily Brewster: We call those variants.

Em Vezina: Yes, exactly. So, we went back to using the word also when we use a parenthetical adjunct, in other words, a little aside or a note that provides examples, online, we use “such as,” which is a very natural way of speaking and reading. And in previous editions of the collegiate, we used as, which is a little less natural, but it saves you five characters. So, those five characters count. I have spent probably weeks worth of time counting characters. So, we reduced those back to as. There were just many aspects like that. So, inflections in print, we use cutback. We call them cutback inflections. So, when we show a plural—

Emily Brewster: So, these are plural, past tense forms.

Em Vezina: Exactly. So, we had to figure out how to, programmatically, change fully written out words. Like jumping, how do you change that just to -ing? Or actually, in that example of jumping, that is a regularly formed inflection, and we decided to go back to our general print convention of not showing regularly formed inflections. So, we tell people that at the beginning of the book and the explanatory notes, and we hope our readers read those and understand them. So, there's a lot of things of figuring out how to remove content and which content to remove. And in some ways, the examples that we just gave are pretty straightforward, and some of the more complicated things were how to reduce the actual definition or the actual text within the definition.

Emily Brewster: Can we talk for a minute about, why did we need to remove things? We talked earlier about this being a bigger book. It's got a bigger print, it's got a bigger page, and the actual physical object is bigger. So, what did we need to remove? Why did we need to make it smaller?

Linda Wood: There still was too much online to be put into a book, but with the advantage of having our website, we are able to tell exactly what people were looking up and what they weren't. So, why waste space in our book on words that people are not looking up? So, we used that lookup data to determine what should stay and what should go.

Emily Brewster: Right, because unlike an unabridged dictionary, this dictionary does not have all the words that we recognize as established in the English language. It's a desk dictionary that is not meant to be as comprehensive as an unabridged dictionary, but still we want everyone to be able to find what they're looking for in it.

Karen Wilkinson: And so we took this opportunity to completely refocus the book, to rebuild it from the ground up using lookup statistics, which is something that wasn't available to the editors of previous collegiates. So, we were able to say, "Okay, this bottom percentage of words that people are not looking up, let's take a look at those. Let's have our editors carefully review those and see which ones should stay and which ones should go." Some of them are words for outdated technologies. Wagonet is an example—

Peter Sokolowski: How?

Karen Wilkinson: ... of one that we got rid of, a type of carriage with a very specific seating configuration.

Emily Brewster: But it was a matter of looking at that long tail of dictionary lookups at Merriam-Webster.com and seeing, "Okay, nobody has looked this up in five years." There was a big list, and then editors were assigned to go through that list. These were not cut indiscriminately. It wasn't like we said, "Okay, nobody's looked up wagonet. It's gone," because we also wanted to consider... We had to know whether these words appeared in any definitions, because if they appear in a definition, you cannot cut them unless you also address the appearance in that other definition. And then we also wanted to keep words that were obscure, but that still had literary value, might be valuable for other reasons other than their lookup status.

Peter Sokolowski: This is the first time that we've taken the data, this knowledge of how people use a dictionary. Dictionaries were around for 400 years before anyone knew which words were being looked up, and now I think we take it for granted. It's kind of like a mindset. We all know what search has done to the way that we think and the way that we ask questions. When we started presenting the lookup data from Merriam-Webster, the most looked up words of a given day or week or year, that was shocking and new.

And I think now, of course, the culture has absorbed that. We understand everything is a metric, that we can measure things now, but measuring that very long tail of a vocabulary that goes on forever. And one of the words I noticed that was dropped was melodramatise with an S, that is to say the British variant spelling of melodramatize. So, I mean, we get to that level of detail and recognize that, "Okay, this form probably doesn't need to take up space in a new print edition of the dictionary."

Em Vezina: I wanted to add that everything that we did, from the beginning, we're thinking about this is a print book for the digital age. That was our guiding star. Everything we did was thinking about the project through that lens. So, that is what we were thinking about when we were thinking about how to reduce the content to fit into a book. It's what we thought about when we were thinking about the design. We never lost sight of that. And it really, I think, affected every decision that we made, and it was great to have a guiding star to follow. It gave us something to hold onto throughout the process. I think it affected all of our decisions.

Linda Wood: I think that the book is sort of the intersection of the digital and the print. This is where it meets because of the use of the data, because of some of the terminology. Even the little search icon that we put at the top 500 words, that search icon comes from online, but everyone knows what it means, so that would be a great icon for the words that are looked up most. Everyone will understand that.

Karen Wilkinson: That's a great point. And also the top 500 were chosen on the basis of that—

Linda Wood: That's right.

Karen Wilkinson: ... those look up statistics. Yeah.

Linda Wood: Of course. How else would we know?

Emily Brewster: Right. Why highlight them?

Karen Wilkinson: Because those are the words that people are looking up the most and that they clearly have questions about. People are looking for answers to usage doubts, for example. So, a lot of these words tend to be kind of abstract concepts, like paradox, for example, is a commonly looked up word. Ethereal, I think, was in there. So, people are trying to figure out what these words mean, how they're used, in what context they're used, and we wanted to answer those questions, and we wanted to answer those questions better than we had done in previous editions.

And that's not to knock previous editions. They had much more severe space constraints. So, we wanted to take some of the room that we were making by enlarging the book and by choosing a space-conscious but very legible font and really focus on the information that people have been seeking out on our website and that we know people are looking for on our website. So, that's where the top 500 came from.

Peter Sokolowski: To address what Linda just said, that there are words in this print dictionary that are probably not defined in print anywhere else because they come from online culture, a word like gaslighting or doomscroll or even dumb phone. These are all very new words to the culture, but they're sitting in this old-fashioned package, and it is an intersection of the old and the new.

Linda Wood: The desire to have a print dictionary is similar to the way people now don't want smartphones anymore. They want their dumb phones again. I don't know if backlash is too strong a word for it, but there is this sense of people wanting something more tactile, more trustworthy, I guess, is a word you could use, more authentic. There's so much skepticism. There's so much distrust that I think these kinds of things bring people a certain level of comfort.

Emily Brewster: The online world, as we all know, is also incredibly distracting. So, if you've got this book in your lap, you will be distracted, but you're not going to be distracted by pictures of cats. Instead, you're going to be distracted by the stuff we've put in it.

Karen Wilkinson: By pictures of amphoras and—

Linda Wood: Oh, they're beautiful. The illustrations are just beautiful. They're like little works of art. Amphora is a beautiful one. There's one that has never been in a Collegiate before, the octopus. What a gorgeous little picture. You could hang it on your wall.

Emily Brewster: What was the process for the pictures?

Linda Wood: We would look at what we have. We have an enormous art archive, and we would go through. And you want to spread them out every so many pages. You want a variety of different types of things illustrated. You want some that have more diagrams, call-outs to explain things more. It was a variety of things to consider.

Emily Brewster: Beautiful and useful.

Peter Sokolowski: This is art that was created for this purpose. This is for, and often by colleagues that we knew, artists on staff, colleagues who were sometimes definers who are also artists, who did a double duty, which I found amazing that the amount of talent to have several of those colleagues through the years. So, I can recognize some of their work in these pages. I see on this spread luna moth and lute, musical instruments and articles of clothing, architectural elements—

Linda Wood: Ships.

Peter Sokolowski: ... and ships. Yeah, there are things that really do stand out.

Emily Brewster: Oh, there's a nice diagram of a grasshopper here, at the entry for insect.

Linda Wood: A line drawing like this can really focus in on things that the artist wants to call attention to, as opposed to, sometimes a photograph just can't capture that.

Emily Brewster: Illustrations are very useful for definers who know the limitation of language. Sometimes putting together a concise definition that is accurate and simple, you can do so much more efficiently with an illustration, in many cases, than you can with the language of a definition.

Peter Sokolowski: If you're a definer, just think about the task. If you're describing a flower or the shape of a leaf or even a breed of dog, what you realize is you could be describing any one of dozens of leaves or flowers or dogs. So, ultimately, having a little engraving, a little line drawing really is helpful to see, "Oh, yes, that is a Labrador, and that's a spaniel."

Emily Brewster: There are other ways to get distracted by this book. Em, what is your favorite distraction in this book?

Em Vezina: This is super nerdy, but I like flipping through and finding... I call them the snotes. They're the supplemental information notes. They have little bits of what we consider kind of encyclopedic information. It was a dictionary convention that was invented for the Merriam-Webster Advanced Learner's Dictionary. And—

Emily Brewster: Published in 2008, Merriam-Webster's Advanced Learner's English Dictionary.

Em Vezina: And I think they're really fun and I feel like I learned something new from each one. They just provide a little bit of information, and they're written in prose, and it's information you couldn't necessarily fit into defining text in the way that the defining text has a lot of limitations. I learned recently that the term Brontosaurus is not considered a valid term for dinosaur. My little nine-year-old heart kind of broke when I read that, but I was looking at some of them, and I love the one at playing card that I happened to stumble upon. It said, "Traditional playing cards come in sets of 52 and are marked on one side to show rank and suit." And it's the kind of information you wouldn't get necessarily in the definition, but it really orients the user. I think it's a brilliant addition to the defining structure. And they're shown in the 12th Edition with a little diamond shape, so you can flip through and look for the diamond.

Peter Sokolowski: It's a way of giving ourselves permission to add information to the entry. It's true that dictionaries and encyclopedias sometimes have a little bit of overlap. And the fact is, if you think of Caesar salad versus Cobb salad, you need to be able to distinguish one from the other, which means you need encyclopedic elements, like a little recipe in this case. Otherwise, they're both salads, and you don't know the difference.

So, we have to add those elements in order to distinguish one idea, one word, one lexical item from another, but this allows us to give that next level of encyclopedic information that maybe the user was looking for in the first place. It might be the reason they're looking Brontosaurus up is that someone put that word into question in a scientific context or an educational context. Now, there's an answer that was maybe not there before, and now we can provide it. It's such a great liberation of the defining structure.

Linda Wood: It's so much easier for the user to read the definition and then read this sentence, as opposed to trying to pack it all into the substitutable definition.

Peter Sokolowski: That leads us to definitions.

Emily Brewster: As the Director of Defining, Karen, what were you thinking at the start of this project as far as guidance for editors, like me, for lexicographers, like us? What were you thinking that we should be keeping in mind?

Karen Wilkinson: Oh, my goodness. Well, I'm certainly not the first Director of Defining who has faced this problem of having to write up a Style for a book that we hadn't yet started to create and that might see a number of changes during the course of the project.

Emily Brewster: Writing a Style, in our case, is to write a very detailed document that provides guidance for the actual structure of the entries and, specifically, what the definitions will be like, what's an appropriate way for an adjective definition to be structured, that sort of thing.

Karen Wilkinson: That's right. So, fortunately, Em, Linda, and I had been having a number of conversations over the many months that Em and Anne were also working on the data. It was a long back-and-forth about how we were going to handle various style matters.

What I ended up doing was taking the Style Guide from the previous edition and annotating it to indicate what had been updated, what was not being updated, what was being kept, and also what might yet change as we continued to work on the project. So, that was the first hurdle. The second, I suppose, would be, how do we approach this very different project? Because we were not taking our traditional editing approach. Normally, when we begin working on an edition, as Linda mentioned, we sit down and we review all of the evidence that our editors have gathered since the previous edition and figure out what should be added, what should be deleted, and what should be revised, et cetera.

In this case, we were starting with a dictionary that was already up to date, and what we wanted to do was refocus it. So the way that Em organized the workflow was as a series of, quote, unquote, "mini projects." So, we would have a group of editors focusing on one aspect of the book, such as cutting, and they would review those lower-ranked entries and indicate what they thought should be cut and what should be kept. We had another group of editors working on top 500. We had another group working on usage paragraphs, and word history paragraphs, and so on and so forth. And then we had our veteran editors, including myself, coming along behind them and checking everything.

So, we did have to think about what instructions each specific group of editors needed. It wasn't just one group of definers who all needed to know the same exact things. We had to say, "Okay, you are working on top 500, so you really need to think about expanding these entries. You need to read the definitions carefully, make sure they're very clear and useful, make sure that they have plenty of illustrations, make sure that if usage information is needed, that it's provided, and so on." For people who are cutting, they needed to focus on whether or not those words were in use, needed, if there was a reason to keep them. So, there were very different focuses for each group of editors, and that was a logistical challenge, but we navigated it successfully.

Peter Sokolowski: And there are also specialized editors who work on, for example, science or etymology—

Karen Wilkinson: Correct. Yeah.

Peter Sokolowski: ... or phonetics.

Karen Wilkinson: That's right. We always have specialists working on those areas, so that was less of a departure, but yeah, they definitely made very important contributions. Our etymologist did an incredible amount of work on the etymologies, taking all of the incredible, useful information that he had put into the online dictionary, cutting it down so that it would fit into the print Collegiate, but still be useful and interesting, and provide the information that the reader was looking for.

Emily Brewster: I think as far as the style of the definitions go, we continued along with the style that we had been using in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, which had already... In the past 15 years, it had shifted really dramatically to be less dictionary-ese and to be just more transparent, using simpler defining vocabulary, expanding definitions so that they could provide all the information that the reader might need. So, we already had that as a foundation, and then continued that with the new entries that were added, too.

Karen Wilkinson: That's right. That was another way in which the online dictionary was influenced by the Learners. The online dictionary and the unabridged dictionary owe a huge debt to the Learners and to these innovations that Steve Perrault introduced.

Emily Brewster: We mentioned the title of the learner's dictionary, but the Merriam-Webster's Advanced Learner's English Dictionary is a monolingual dictionary written for non-native English speakers. And it goes into tremendous detail about the meanings of words in vocabulary that is very easy to understand.

Karen Wilkinson: That's right. It has a number of wonderful features, but perhaps the most important difference between that dictionary and our previous Collegiate Dictionaries is that it is written in plain language. The idea was that it would be something that learners could use and be able to understand as they were learning the language. We used very simple vocabulary, but what we found was that everybody loved it. Everybody loved those definitions. They were so helpful. So, we ended up carrying a lot of that wonderful work over into the online dictionary and, consequently, also over into the 12th Edition.

And I want to stress that I don't mean to say that we dumbed anything down. What we did was make the definitions clearer. We always held them to a high standard of accuracy, but we tried to make them sound natural to the average person so that there wouldn't be any stumbling blocks as they tried to understand a word.

Em Vezina: Comparing C11 to C12, we've added about five times as many status labels—

Linda Wood: Yes.

Em Vezina: ... and 54% more usage notes.

Karen Wilkinson: So, we really beefed up the usage information. We provide usage information in three forms, usage labels, which are little italic words and phrases that appear right before a definition or a series of definitions and that provide information about how those definitions are used. Then there are usage notes which are usually short phrases (usually short) that follow an em dash, and come after a definition, and provide a little bit more information. And then there are the supplementary information notes, that we've already discussed, that tend to run about a sentence or two and, again, provide a little more information, still.

Emily Brewster: Those labels are things like old-fashioned, or archaic, or—

Linda Wood: Humorous.

Emily Brewster: Yeah, yep.

Karen Wilkinson: Humorous, formal, informal, technical, non-technical, impolite, vulgar, obscene, offensive. And some of those are new. So we've expanded the range of labels, added a lot of nuance into those labels. So, we had a much more restrictive set for previous Collegiates. This allows us to provide better guidance to readers when they look at our entries.

Linda Wood: There are a lot of subject labels, like “law,” or “chemistry,” or “philosophy,” which I went to you a lot for, Emily.

Emily Brewster: We now have a note that is “not used technically” or “not in technical use.” Which one is it?

Linda Wood: It is “not used technically.” If I'm not mistaken, I think that started when Joan Narmontas, our Senior Science Editor, and I had questions about words that were supposed to be for medical terms that are used in law or another field, but they're not really the technical medical use of the word. And we're, "How do we express this?" So we came up with “not used technically.”

Emily Brewster: I like that phrase very much. I find it very useful because it's a really efficient way to say that you won't hear this from your doctor or your lawyer, but this is what it means, and you can use it in other contexts.

Karen Wilkinson: Well, we used to not use register labels in the Collegiate. Register labels are labels that express the attitude of the speaker or writer. They include things like “disparaging,” or “formal,” or “informal,” some of the ones we've named. Whereas other labels, which we call status labels, reflect the attitude of the hearer. They include words such as “obscene,” “vulgar,” “impolite,” “offensive,” et cetera.

Emily Brewster: I think that contrast between “disparaging” and “offensive,” it's a good marker of the distinction there. It's “disparaging” means that the person saying it to you is not being nice.

Karen Wilkinson: Exactly.

Emily Brewster: And “offensive” means it doesn't feel good when somebody is using that word toward you or to you.

Karen Wilkinson: And sometimes we use both at the same entry.

Emily Brewster: That's right. That's right.

Karen Wilkinson: Right. So, we have a lot of ability to really hone in on the way a particular word is used and give a very clear idea, and in very little space, to the reader about how they should use that word or not use that word.

Em Vezina: I like the label “dated.”

Karen Wilkinson: Yes. Yeah, that was also new for the 12th. It had previously appeared in the online dictionary, but it was not in the 11th.

Emily Brewster: And what does it mean when a word is dated?

Karen Wilkinson: It means that has largely fallen out of use, and sometimes that is because it now has some level of offensiveness. For example, there are a lot of older medical terms that used to be used in a professional context and that are no longer used because they are now offensive. So, “dated” would be a label that we would include at a word like that.

Emily Brewster: But it's different from “old-fashioned.”

Karen Wilkinson: It's different from “old-fashioned.” “Old-fashioned” indicates that a word has an old-fashioned feel, but it is still often used today. Writers may use it self-consciously to evoke an old-fashioned feel, so there is that distinction. And “old-fashioned” is considered a status label because it often reflects the attitude or the purpose of the writer or speaker, whereas “dated” is a temporal label.

Emily Brewster: We talked about being distracted by various things, and I think there's so much in this book to distract the reader. Again, this is a book lover's dictionary. There are pictures, there are these supplemental information notes, and then there are, also, in a really significant departure from all the Collegiate dictionaries before it, we have these fun little lists.

Linda Wood: The lists come out of the website, again. We have many galleries and fun features that people like on the website, so the lists are an attempt to bring that kind of fun into the dictionary... Or fun is the right word, maybe just interest into the print dictionary.

They can be on decades. There are lists that are words that go from the early 1900s into the 21st century. There are lists that are thematic, words that come from various languages, words from various subject areas. My own favorite is words from the natural world because the words in that list, to me, are just so evocative and, in a way, poetic. Alpine glow is the first one, the reddish glow seen at sunset or sunrise on the summits of mountains. The last word is virga, wisps of precipitation evaporating before reaching the ground. I just think it's such a lovely list.

Emily Brewster: Oh.

Peter Sokolowski: This list includes the word petrichor, which is one of my favorite of the new entries of this edition, and it's a word that means the pleasant odor associated with rainfall. People love this list of words from the 1990s, words that are dated to their first use in the 1990s, words like embiggen, emoji, and facepalm.

These things are incredibly satisfying. What they do is they turn the dictionary into a browsable book, which is absolutely new. I mean, dictionaries were always fun for the serendipity of research. And if you love words, I'm sure many of us, probably all of us listening to this, certainly all of us in this room, enjoy reading dictionaries, going page to page. But now there are these little treats, for example, “Eight Words for Predicting the Future,” including augury and chiromancy, geomancy. And there's another one, “Twelve Words for Light and Darkness,” from auroral to umbra. . So, there are these great ways to isolate groups of words in different ways, whether that's by time or by category. And that is something that we have on the website as kind of a feature, as kind of a browsable magazine of words for word lovers. But now that's been integrated into the dictionary, and that is absolutely new to the 12th Edition.

Emily Brewster: And some of them are definitely to be fun. I'm looking at “Twelve Words for the Cranky and the Disagreeable,” which starts with agonistic, goes through cantankerous and captious, all the way down to hangry, irascible, obstreperous, ornery and splenetic.

Peter Sokolowski: Great words. So, it is a word lover's dictionary. It is still this reference, but it has this element that recognizes that it's used for browsing, and maybe this is a coffee table book. This is not just to sit on a shelf, but its active use will involve this serendipity that might be beyond just the other words defined on a page, but words that are evoked through one of these lists. Really, a lot of fun.

Emily Brewster: And then the entries, themselves, are also places to get lost. And I noticed that NIH is defined as the National Institutes of Health, which did not surprise me at all, but then I saw that there's another sense, “not invented here.” Okay. Turns out I can write dictionaries for 25 years and still be surprised by what's inside.

Peter Sokolowski: And that's the serendipity of research. I mean, the point that I would make too is that, online, those entries are isolated. You tend to look at one word at a time, one entry at a time. I was checking lunar, which is our adjective for the things that do with the moon, of course, but I noticed that lunacy and, of course, lunatic are right next to it. It reminds you that in pre-modern ideas of medicine or mental health, that the cycles of the moon were associated with someone's mental condition.

But then I found this word that I did not know, lunation, which is essentially a period of 29 days, and I realized that lunation connects to lunar. It's the period of time the moon takes to orbit the earth, but then I realized, "Oh, that word month that we have comes from the word moon."

So, I just had a nice little circuit of Latin versus old English, abstract versus concrete, pre-modern versus modern, pre-scientific versus more technical, and all just because I discovered this word lunation that happened to be next to lunatic on the page. And that's what I mean by the serendipity of research, because you find things that you weren't looking for.

Karen Wilkinson: Peter, I believe serendipity is a top 500 word.

Peter Sokolowski: It should be. It should be. Those words tend to be from classical roots, Greek and Latin words, words like integrity and ubiquitous, paradigm and precocious. And they tend to have those abstract meanings, which means these are hard to encapsulate in other words. When you're talking about a concrete noun, you can describe the thing. But these are not concrete and so that tends to be an intellectual exercise, which we know is the reason many people make a visit to the dictionary. It's also the hardest work that we, as lexicographers, can do. Proving ground for good defining is an efficient abstract definition. And boy, I'm glad that we label those entries. I haven't done the survey, but I bet there are very few concrete objects or nouns, but there are very many abstract ideas that are in those words.

Karen Wilkinson: That's absolutely correct. The list is dominated by abstract terms.

Emily Brewster: Serendipity also includes a story of the word's origin.

Linda Wood: A word history paragraph.

Emily Brewster: A word history paragraph.

Karen Wilkinson: Yes, yes.

Emily Brewster: "Serendipity was coined by author Horace Walpole, in a letter to his friend Horace Mann. Walpole wrote, 'The discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call serendipity, a very expressive word, which as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall endeavor to explain to you. I once read a silly fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip. As their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things that they were not in quest of.' Walpole's memory of the tale, which was not quite accurate, gave serendipity the meaning it retains to this day."

Em Vezina: Those word history paragraphs are in shaded boxes. And as far as, to my knowledge, I believe this is the first Collegiate to use shading. The lists are also encapsulated in a shaded box that is intended to also echo the trim around the front cover.

52:00 Karen Wilkinson: Yeah, every aspect of the book is intentional and was likely talked about for many hours.

Em Vezina: I actually was thinking about that, Peter, as you were taking the plastic wrap off of the book, I thought about how many hours I have spent discussing whether to shrink wrap the book or not.

Linda Wood: Whether it would have a jacket or not, that was a—

Karen Wilkinson: That's right.

Linda Wood: ... huge departure from previous editions.

Emily Brewster: And why did you decide no jacket?

Em Vezina: We really were trying to straddle that line between something that evoked an old-fashioned kind of feeling and yet also felt very modern and very now. And dust jackets are not that. So, the cloth, like when you look back at the C1 and C2 and C3, they have cloth covers. So, to use the cloth is very old-fashioned feeling. But something that modern cloth covers can do that the old-fashioned cloth covers don't do is that it has multiple colors. So, if you look at an older book, it will have usually just a cloth cover and usually gold print on them. So, to have, this has gold, this has white, on the spine, it has our modern bullseye logo with blue and white and red, I feel like we hit that sweet spot of straddling that line and bringing the modern and the tradition together.

I do want to make sure that we say that Angel Johnston, our Senior Graphic Designer, really, I think, gets most of the credit for this cover, with a lot of input from Miles Kronby and from us, from a team of people working on this, but she ultimately is the one who really put the design into...

Linda Wood: She did a beautiful job.

Peter Sokolowski: There's something about this that evokes all of those older editions, and yet it's brand new, as everything we've talked about today is new. I think many users would open this up and actually go right into the book and maybe not even notice how much is new, how much has changed, because there's also all the familiar elements. There's the boldfaced colon that introduces every definition, which is kind of a Merriam-Webster trademark. That's retained. The phonetics transcriptions are kind of what you expect, the ones that we've used in the past. The etymologies are there. They're at the end of the entries with the date of first known use. So, I think we've made it so that it's self-explanatory. You can open it up and it works like every other dictionary, but now is almost every line will have something new.

Karen Wilkinson: We really wanted to maintain that continuity even as we were introducing all these new features. So, it was very important to us that a user be able to open the dictionary up and immediately know where to find the information they were looking for.

Linda Wood: It was kind of scary changing something, but we had a conversation with John Morse, who was our longtime president of the company. One afternoon, he was in the office, and he said to us, "Make it your own." That was very freeing.

Karen Wilkinson: Yeah, it was. We were very grateful for his input and for the input of Steve Perrault and Madeleine Novak.

Linda Wood: Yes, absolutely.

Emily Brewster: Right. Steve Perrault, former Director of Defining, and Madeleine Novak, former Director of Operations.

Peter Sokolowski: The role of the Collegiate Dictionary we haven't mentioned had a real professional purpose as well because it is the style guide for print publishing. And of course, the Collegiate itself is the style book for the primary references for print publishing, like the Chicago Manual of Style, like the Associated Press, like the Modern Language Association Guide. So, it's a dictionary that actually touches many professional editors in a daily way, and I think that's an important and an exciting thing. I look forward to introducing more people in the publishing industry to this, and I think they're going to love that they have a new Collegiate Dictionary.

Karen Wilkinson: Yes. Oh, and I do want to mention, though, that this material that we're talking about that was removed, the low lookup entries, is all still available online. We didn't remove it from the online version. It was purely done for the print edition for space.

Emily Brewster: Also removed from the print edition, our lists at the end. We used to have this back matter. A long time ago, you could find out through your friendly Collegiate Dictionary the names of each and every college and university in the United States, which must have been exceedingly useful to somebody for some period of time. That's been gone for a while. Right?

Karen Wilkinson: Yes.

Emily Brewster: But for this, for the 12th Collegiate, we also removed the geographical and biographical entry sections, which were, again, after the A-to-Z part of the book.

Linda Wood: We did that for a number of reasons. Partly, we did it because it was just immediately out of date. The minute the book was published, it was already out of date because terms change. People's terms of office change. People pass away. The population figures were hopelessly out of date constantly. There was no way to keep them evergreen.

And then the other main reason we got rid of them is that people don't look to the Collegiate Dictionary for that kind of information anymore. You're not looking to the back of your dictionary to find out...

Emily Brewster: What the population of Poughkeepsie is.

Linda Wood: Exactly. So, they outlived their usefulness, and they were impossible to keep up to date.

Em Vezina: They were very minimal. So, that was also part of the issue is you might look up someone's name, and it says, "Swedish doctor." Well, it doesn't necessarily say why this person is important. Also, it's a section that was written quite a while ago, and maybe different people might be added or subtracted from a more modern perspective, that certainly the biographical name section was

Linda Wood: In particular.

Em Vezina: Yeah, in particular, it's problematic for many reasons, and it's not fun to keep trying to—

Peter Sokolowski: Yeah, no.

Em Vezina: ... edit it and keep it up to date.

Emily Brewster: And we don't think any of you will miss it.

Em Vezina: No.

Karen Wilkinson: By removing it, we can focus on the kinds of information that only a dictionary can provide.

Peter Sokolowski: Well, that's it. That intersection of encyclopedic and the lexical is something that dictionaries have struggled with from the very beginning. And it's one that Merriam-Webster, in particular, was the focus of criticism in 1961, with the third edition of the Unabridged Dictionary because the second edition had had entries for George Washington and the Great Pyramid and the Eiffel Tower and Hark the Herald Angels Sing. And basically, at a certain point, the editors at that time said, "We can't give enough about this material to make it worth keeping, and we can give better information about lexical material." So, those encyclopedic headwords were dropped. And now it's interesting that sort of the last part of that argument is that list that we made at the end for the Collegiate only. It was never in the Unabridged in recent decades.

Karen Wilkinson: No, I think the justification was that the book was originally aimed at college students.

Peter Sokolowski: Yeah, exactly.

Karen Wilkinson: So, it was thought that kind of information would be useful for them.

Linda Wood: Some of the run-ons that were in the biographical section, for example, now are in the A to Z. Like Orwellian was run on—

Peter Sokolowski: That makes sense.

Linda Wood: ... at Orwell—

Peter Sokolowski: Sure.

Linda Wood: ... now.

Emily Brewster: Right. And just to gloss that term for people, a word that used to be just listed near the end of an entry because it's a form of the headword, the main entry, now has its own entry. We took out the entry for George Orwell that had been the biographical section, but there is an entry for the adjective Orwellian.

Karen Wilkinson: Exactly.

Em Vezina: Right, which is much more useful.

Peter Sokolowski: Of course.

Emily Brewster: Yes.

Karen Wilkinson: Yes, right.

Em Vezina: Because, one, if someone wanted to look up Orwellian in the 11th edition, they probably wouldn't think to go to the biographical name section. Especially, if you don't know what it means, why would you know—

Emily Brewster: Right.

Em Vezina: ... to go to the biographical name section? And this is more useful now. It has a definition. The definition says, "Of, relating to or suggestive of George Orwell or his writings, especially relating to or suggestive of the dystopian reality depicted in the novel 1984."

Linda Wood: If you had just seen Orwellian at the end of George Orwell's, that gave you none of that.

Karen Wilkinson: We were talking about features that were brought over from the Learner's via the online dictionary, and there are a number of examples, quotations, and made-up examples, which we call verbal illustrations, that have glosses in them. And those glosses maybe explain the meaning of a longer phrase involving the headword, or maybe they just explain that particular use of the headword in that context a little bit more thoroughly than the definition does. And that innovation is one that our readers seem to find very helpful and first debuted in the Learner's.

Emily Brewster: Yeah, I have an example here from the entry for moment, "It was a defining moment for him." And then within that it says, there's a bracket, "equals an extremely important time in one's development." So that's the way that defining moment is addressed as a phrase within the entry for moment. So, you don't have to go to the word defining and find it. But that same idea will be covered there, also, but we are able to use these really efficient ways of pinpointing a particular nuance of a word's meaning.

Karen Wilkinson: Right, and also placing the information where the reader needs it.

Em Vezina: We were talking about the book as a print book that people still take pleasure, especially in this digital age, of going back to things that are tangible that you can flip through, you can look at, that you have this serendipitous discovery of information you weren't even looking for. And I was thinking about, in the digital age, something that I think more people are thinking harder about is how to maintain connection, in connection with something that is physical, is special. You stop looking at a screen and something you can feel, you can touch, you can look at side by side with your friends or your family.

And I was thinking about how, of our top 500 lookups, the number one lookup, my understanding is, basically, since we've been tracking this, is the word love. It's a word everyone knows how to spell. Everyone has a basic understanding of what it means, and yet we crave more information. We crave more connection. And I feel like this is all part of the package. I just wanted to share that, to me, that feels something that's really special about this book.

Peter Sokolowski: Well, I would just say congratulations to you three for leading such an incredible project but also for carrying on this tradition, because that's sort of what we're all talking about. We all got jobs, in our cases, three decades or more ago, or two decades or more ago. I think the five of us represent 150 some years of experience at this job at a very unique kind of enterprise, and this seems like going back to basics. It's our heritage, but it's also our present. And I think we've never seen the two things embodied in one book, as well as with the 12th Collegiate.

Emily Brewster: Karen, Em, and Linda, thank you so much for being with us today, and thank you for making a new Collegiate Dictionary happen.

Em Vezina: Thank you.

Linda Wood: Thank you.

Karen Wilkinson: No, thank you, and thank you to everybody else who worked on it.

Em Vezina: Yes.

Karen Wilkinson: Yes. Many people to recognize.

Emily Brewster: Thanks to Linda Wood, Karen Wilkinson, and Em Vezina from the Merriam-Webster Editorial Department for this conversation about the 12th Collegiate. For the Word of the Day and all your general dictionary needs, visit merriam-webster.com.

Our theme music is by Tobias Voigt.

With many thanks to New England Public Media for the use of their studios, and deep appreciation for our producer, John Voci. I'm Emily Brewster for Peter Sokolowski. Thank you for listening.