Stefan Fatsis’s Unabridged

Stefan Fatsis. Unabridged: The Thrill of ( and Threat to ) the Modern Dictionary. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025. xii + 397 pages. $30 hardcover.

Stefan Fatsis, best known for writing about sports and competitive Scrabble, traces his love of dictionaries to a Webster’s New World Dictionary that he received in 1974 for his eleventh birthday. In 2014, Fatsis established himself at Merriam-Webster headquarters in Springfield, Massachusetts as what might be called a visiting rookie lexicographer, trying his hand at defining words (microaggression, safe space, sheeple, among others), selecting apt accompanying citations, and learning his way around the world of dictionary-making. And thus this book was born.

Unabridged offers a capsule history of Merriam-Webster: Noah Webster, George and Charles Merriam, the dictionary wars of the nineteenth century, the encyclopedic Webster’s Second, Philip Gove and Webster’s Third, and the ever-postponed announcement of a fourth (online-only) M-W unabridged. In the present, where Fatsis focuses his attention, we find a business increasingly reliant on online word games, attention-getting tweets (often trolling a certain autocrat), and press releases about shiny new entries (on fleek, rizz ). And despite significant layoffs, Merriam-Webster is now more or less the dictionary business in the United States, with competitors having shut down or turned ghostly. The ghost is the American Heritage Dictionary, with just four part-time employees and (since 2018) no Usage Panel.¹

Fatsis gives us wonderful glimpses of life at 47 Federal Street in Springfield: massive citation files, with handwritten slips going back many decades, the Backward Index (which answers such questions as how many words end in -ology ), letters from readers (about racial slurs, among other words), wooden desks, a telephone booth with a logbook for employee calls, and work done with extraordinarily patient devotion. But there are fewer and fewer people to do that work. “Who’s being trained as a lexicographer now?” asks Indiana University professor Michael Adams. His answer: “Almost no one.” The threat of the Internet looms large: Fatsis notes a slide shown at a lexicography conference depicting a USS Dictionary headed toward an iceberg labeled Google — Google, whose AI responses to searches wrecked dictionary.com and are estimated to take 30–70% of the traffic that once went to Merriam-Webster. In 2004 lexicographer Erin McKean estimated that there were 200 full-time lexicographers in the United States. In 2025, there were perhaps thirty to fifty.

Jacket blurbs describe Unabridged as “smart and funny” and “positively rollicking,” and there are, indeed, many moments of delight here, including the saga of Philip Gove’s covert plan to get fuck into Webster’s Third and a visit to the dictionary-collector Madeline Kripke’s Greenwich Village apartment. But as with a story about Boston’s last typewriter shop or the end of Manhattan’s Music Row, there’s something undeniably sad about a book that surveys the waning of American lexicography.

I own many dictionaries. I don’t need another. But I’m buying a copy of Merriam-Webster’s new Collegiate this week.

*

Later in the day: Britannica and Merriam-Webster are suing OpenAI for copyright infringement.

¹ The AHD website still touts the now-defunct Usage Panel. Some of those listed as members are no longer living.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard) : A review of Sarah Ogilvie’s The Dictionary People : A review of David Skinner’s The Story of Ain’t : A review of Kory Stamper’s Word by Word