NEW YORK (AP) — Phrase nerd alert: Merriam-Webster introduced Thursday it has taken the uncommon step of totally revising and reimagining certainly one of its hottest dictionaries with a contemporary version that provides over 5,000 new phrases, together with “petrichor,” “teraflop,” “dumbphone” and “ghost kitchen.”
The twelfth version of “Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary” comes 22 years after the e-book’s final hard-copy replace and amid declining U.S. gross sales for analog dictionaries total, in response to Circana BookScan. It will likely be launched Nov. 18, with preorders now out there.
Petrichor, by the best way, is a pleasing odor after a rainfall following a heat, dry interval. Teraflop is a unit of measure for calculating the velocity of a pc. Dumbphones are simply that, cellular units we used earlier than the smartphone revolution. And ghost kitchens, which got here into their very own in the course of the pandemic, are business areas for rent.
Different additions: “cold brew,” “farm-to-table,” “rizz,” “dad bod,” “hard pass,” “adulting” and “cancel culture.” There’s additionally “beast mode,” “dashcam,” “doomscroll,”“WFH” and “side-eye.”
The brand new “Collegiate” additionally consists of enhanced entries for some prime lookups, and greater than 20,000 new utilization examples. The entire added phrases had been already out there on Merriam-Webster.com.
How did they make room for all that?
The corporate eliminated two sections of the “Collegiate’s” eleventh version that had sparse biographical and geographical entries to make room for the brand new content material. Greg Barlow, Merriam-Webster’s president, solely instructed The Related Press forward of the announcement that individuals now not use dictionaries to study things like the situation of Kalamazoo or who Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was. For that, they attain for the web.
(It’s a metropolis in southwest Michigan, for the eternally curious, and he is a Russian composer who died in 1908.)
Merriam-Webster additionally eradicated some obscure and antiquated phrases, together with “enwheel,” that means encircle.
“We wanted to make the ‘Collegiate’ more useful, a better design, more interesting,” Barlow mentioned. “We wanted it to be more rewarding to browse, more fun to look through, and to really be practical for research, but also a beautiful book.”
What’s occurring with dictionary gross sales normally?
The chunky, linen-cover “Collegiate” replace weighs in at almost 5 kilos. It comes as grownup reference e-book gross sales, together with dictionaries and atlases, have proven annual declines since 2022, in response to Circana BookScan, which captures 85% of the print market. Within the 12-month interval ending Sept., 6, dictionary gross sales fell 9% in contrast with the identical interval prior.
Merriam-Webster, the nation’s main dictionary firm, sells about 1.5 million of them a yr. Most are recurrently revised however not totally overhauled just like the “Collegiate,” Barlow mentioned. The corporate’s retail gross sales total have usually held regular in the previous few years, he mentioned. Print gross sales account for a small fraction of the corporate’s income.
“While the print dictionary is not at all important to the growth and profitability of this wonderful language company, it’s still our heart,” Barlow mentioned. “There are people out there who just love books, and we love books.”
For dictionary gross sales total, there is a little bit of sunshine at Barnes & Noble. The chain’s dictionary gross sales have gone up to this point this yr over the identical interval in 2024, mentioned Kat Sarfas, advertising and marketing supervisor for nonfiction. She famous comparable will increase for such reference supplies because the U.S. Structure as nicely.
“I do think there is that nostalgia that people have to be able to pull a dictionary off the shelf and look up a word,” Sarfas mentioned. “There’s a certain desire to have these kinds of reference materials at home. It may be something that people feel like, as educated people, we should own.”
Dictionaries could also be down however they don’t seem to be lifeless but
Whereas Merriam-Webster’s “Collegiate,” initially targeted on the wants of faculty college students, is amongst prime sellers in dictionaries for Barnes & Noble, its general-interest “The Merriam-Webster Dictionary” is extra widespread. It was final tweaked in 2022. A pocket model can be a robust vendor, Sarfas mentioned.
Loss of life knells for print dictionaries have been ringing because the rise of the web, mentioned Grant Barrett, a lexicographer, former dictionary editor for Merriam-Webster and others, and co-host of public radio’s “A Way with Words.”
“Now we’re in this weird limbo where people want the dictionary but they don’t want to pay for it, because they’re used to getting things for free on the internet,” he mentioned.
Merriam-Webster’s web site receives a couple of billion visits a yr, making the corporate a phrase digital chief as nicely, Barlow mentioned. Over the past 10 years, income total has grown by almost 500% on the power of its on-line dictionary, thesaurus, cellular apps and phrase video games.
The brand new “Collegiate” introduces curated phrase lists, comparable to phrases from the Nineties. And it has extra phrase histories. Do you know “calculate” comes from the Latin for “pebble,” as a result of historic Romans used little stones to do addition and subtraction?
And, for extremely granular dictionary followers, the brand new “Collegiate” preserves lettered thumb notches — these little finger-size dents alongside the perimeters of reference e-book pages — to make looking simpler. The one printer doing the notches within the U.S. has closed since Merriam-Webster was final in want, so it needed to go to India, Barlow mentioned.
Why do print dictionaries nonetheless matter?
Print variations nonetheless matter in preserving cultures, as presents, as a family utility, and for college kids below cellphone bans in school, amongst different causes, mentioned Sarfas, Barrett and different e-book execs.
“There are lots of communities that speak languages that have never been documented, and they may not have been documented because those languages might have been actively suppressed. I’m thinking about Indigenous communities across North America,” mentioned Lindsay Rose Russell, government director of the Dictionary Society of North America.
“Having a print dictionary has all along sort of indicated the legitimacy of a language,” mentioned Russell, additionally an creator who teaches English on the College of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Barrett mentioned his present and its companion podcast obtain a number of letters from readers that lend perception into how they use dictionaries.
“Some people use the dictionary almost as a meditative resource where they just open it up and see what they find and kind of let their minds wander a little bit,” he mentioned.
Obtained a band in want of a reputation? Commodores’ trumpet participant William King used a dictionary to seek out his, working his finger down a web page, Russell famous.
“We lucked out,” King instructed Folks journal in 1978. “We almost became ‘The Commodes.’ ”
