Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary

In this striking account, journalist Fatsis (Word Freak) explores the history and current state of the dictionary industry. Embedding himself within Merriam-Webster’s office as a “lexicographer-in-training,” he not only sifts through sprawling archives of citation slips (“crammed inside drawers, stacked in stairwells, smushed into creaky filing cabinets”) that record multigenerational debates over the definitions of words, but strives to convince his editor to enter words like alt-right and microaggression into Merriam-Webster’s hallowed pages. The book acquires an unexpectedly wide-ranging scope as Fatsis unearths contentious, centuries-long quibbles over gender-neutral pronouns—one suggestion from 1884: thon—and visits fanatical collectors like the “doyenne of dictionaries” Madeline Kripke, whose extensive collection, stuffed inside her Greenwich Village apartment, includes studies on words used by “tramps, hobos, and the unhoused.” The author also probes the many controversies provoked by swear words and slurs (the intra-office effort to produce one such entry was like “defusing a bomb”) and recollects how a citation he entered for sheeple, drawn from a negative review of an iPhone case, caused a kerfuffle among Apple devotees. Fatsis portrays the dictionary industry as dedicated to maintaining its rigor and excellence but, especially with its many recent layoffs and closures (as well as the surprise prominence of its trolling social media presence), also constantly in flux—much as the language it catalogs remains “slippery and mutable and forever collapsing in on itself.” Capacious and revealing, this is a logophile’s dream. (Oct.)