Unabridged
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.
In his third book of participatory journalism, Stefan Fatsis embeds 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. Fatsis discovered the history and fascinating subculture of the dictionary and of those who curate and revere, as he writes, “one of the most basic features of our collective humanity.” He 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 pronoun usage. He votes on the annual Word of the Year, travels to the home of 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 draft definitions that are enshrined in the pixelated lexicon.
Unabridged takes readers to the heart of an industry in flux, celebrating as it does the sheer thrill and wonder of words.
Praise for Unabridged
“Capacious and revealing, this is a logophile’s dream.”
— Publishers Weekly, starred review
“If you love language, you’ll find yourself thoroughly delighted by Unabridged. It’s smart and funny—Fatsis, a wonderful writer, is a perfect guide into the weird, fascinating, and urgent world of words.”
— Susan Orlean, national bestselling author of The Orchid Thief and The Library Book
“Unabridged is unputdownable. Is that in Merriam-Webster? I'm not going to check.”
— Ken Jennings, host of Jeopardy! and author of Maphead
“An erudite, charming, positively rollicking account of American lexicography. Fatsis reveals, in loving detail, the process by which our language is categorized, codified, and of course defined, word by word by word.”
— Benjamin Dreyer, author of the New York Times bestseller Dreyer's English
“Word nerds, rejoice! With this deep dive into the dictionary, Stefan Fatsis takes readers on an extraordinary, eye-opening journey. The writing in these pages is beautiful, the research impeccable, and the joy of discovery contagious. I loved every word of this book.”
— Jonathan Eig, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for King: A Life
“The author of the essential paean to competitive Scrabble now brings us another close-up look at words and the people who are obsessed with them. Unabridged is a fascinating and eloquent dive into Merriam-Webster and the world of dictionaries that is––by definition––another essential read.”
— Meg Wolitzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Interestings and The Female Persuasion
“A vivid and uncannily accurate picture of what it’s like to produce dictionaries—and a poignant tale of a rarefied and idealistic world that's rapidly vanishing.”
— Jesse Sheidlower, former editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary and author of The F-Word
“Unabridged is a whip-smart, entertaining, and thoughtful chronicle of the prospects for dictionaries at a time when Google—or, even more so, AI—might seem to be poised to take over all their functions.”
—Ben Yagoda, author of Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English
“People have to decide what ‘gets into the dictionary.’ This witty book gives us a look into the Rooms Where It Happens.”
— John McWhorter, author of Nine Nasty Words and Pronoun Trouble
“Stefan Fatsis has written the book I have wanted to read for years: the untold story of the American language and how it has been curated and developed by the editors at Merriam-Webster. But into this fascinating narrative Fatsis himself becomes part of the story as a rookie lexicographer working his way into the system, giving this book an extra dimension, charm, and wit. You find yourself cheering for Fatsis to score a definition like a Little League parent pulling for their kid.”
— Paul Dickson, author of The Dickson Baseball Dictionary
and G.I. Jive: A Dictionary of Words at War
“A captivating look at the inner life of dictionaries. For anyone who’s ever had a favorite word.”
— Mignon Fogarty, host of the “Grammar Girl” podcast
“Right from the opening pages of Unabridged, you know you’re in the hands of an author who’s having an absolute blast discovering the story that unfolds before you. Read on and Fatsis’s joy will quickly become your own.”
—Drew Magary, author of The Hike and The Postmortal