OT (sort of): The Death of Dictionaries

[nancygoat]

From the New Yorker, recently:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/12/29/unabridged-the-thrill-of-and-threat-to-the-modern-dictionary-stefan-fatsis-book-review 

[Efrem Mallach]

It's bwhind their paywal, Nancy. Can you summarize?

Efrem

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On Feb 1, 2026, at 5:34 AM, nancygoat <nanc...@gmail.com> wrote:

From the New Yorker, recently:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/12/29/unabridged-the-thrill-of-and-threat-to-the-modern-dictionary-stefan-fatsis-book-review 

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[Paul Keating]

Entertaining, and quibbles aside, true. 

The M-W Collegiate is still around, just, with a new 12th edition this year, but the other “desk dictionaries” that players used in the early decades of Dixonary are not. The American Heritage Dictionary, the Random House Dictionary, and Webster’s New World Dictionary (Cleveland) have all ceased publication, and licensed their content to Collins Online. That is why The “Real” Rules offers extensive commentary on the phrase ‘from any accepted dictionary’ that appears in the 1990 rules: in the sense the drafters of those rules had in mind, that is, books, there are no dictionaries left to accept.

The M-W Unabridged, like the OED, will never see a new print edition. At the turn of the century both had plans for one. By the end of the decade, those plans had been quietly shelved. Both dictionaries survive online behind paywalls that keep the web crawlers out, and I for one am happy to pay the subscriptions. But most people are satisfied with what they can get for “free” (after wading through the ads). Lexicography has become an academic discipline, rather like archaeology or natural history, that is valued for itself, and not for the 5000-page status symbols that were once its money-making by-products.

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Paul Keating

Soustons, Nouvelle Aquitaine, France