I read about this book in The New Yorker early this year. The book review, written by Louis Menand, was so interesting to me that I: 1) photocopied the article to give my friend, Emi; and 2) purchased the $30 hardcover from my local bookstore (I had a gift card).

When I was in grade school, the dictionary was a source of authority. It contained the infinite knowledge and wisdom of which words were actual words, how they were spelled, what they meant, and how they should be used. It was a tool for a young person just learning to read and write that offered clarity in its firm, mostly straightforward answers.

Stefan Fatsis has fully embraced this romanticization of the dictionary in researching his book. He does what’s probably called participatory journalism: he became a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster for a few years in order to write this book. (For a previous book he wrote, A Few Seconds of Panic, Fatsis became an NFL kicker. I think he writes solely as an excuse to fulfill his bucket list.) His book details the history of the dictionary, beginning with Noah Webster’s 1828 An American Dictionary of the English Language all the way to what the future may (or may not) hold for the dictionary industry. It answers all the questions I had as a kid about the dictionary that I’ve slowly forgotten, demystifying the authoritative word book.

The book is a well-structured account of the English dictionary industry, woven together nicely using both facts and information as well as Fatsis’s own notes and reflections. I think he does a great job balancing the objective content with stuff about himself (which many journalists struggle to do when bookwriting). While his unbridled love for Merriam-Webster shines through his writing in a very unbridled way, I think it’s pretty obvious when his bias shows, and Fatsis most certainly deals the company its fair share of criticism where appropriate.

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The most fascinating thing this book helped me discover was Madeline Kripke’s dictionary collection.

Kripke’s parents were friends with Warren Buffett and became rich as a result. She spent her adult life in a small apartment in Manhattan, where she collected all sorts of stuff: books, photographs, correspondence, dictionaries, whatever. They were mostly about words and language. What was unique about her, though, was that she (at least from what I’m told) really wasn’t a hoarder—she knew something about every artifact she owned.

Fatsis recounts his visit with Kripke with wonderful detail (and humor) in chapter 8. What I discovered before even starting the book, though, was that Fatsis was scheduled to speak at Indiana University—where I live. I immediately began reading the book (it had been sitting in my room for about a month), as I had only a week before the book talk. (My goal was to finish the book before the talk; I only made it to the end of chapter 8.)

Fatsis came to Indiana last month because of Kripke. She died of COVID in April 2020, and after some bidding and negotiations with her brother, IU acquired her entire collection (for around $750,000, I think). It’s all at the Lilly Library, where the book talk was hosted. Some of her collection is now on display—the Fatsis event was the first night of the exhibit, titled The Whole World in a Book. It will be up until July 2026.

The talk was interesting, though a lot of what he shared was already written in the first half of the book. The demographic of the audience struck me—we were, of course, the youngest people present; many audience members were university professors of linguistics, language, English, etc.

After the event, Fatsis signed my book. I also tried to take a 0.5 selfie with him but, as we frustratingly realized on our way to the car, instead of taking the picture with the volume button, I turned the phone off.

One item in Kripke’s collection, which Fatsis included in the book, but isn’t currently on display at the Lilly, is a letter from Walter Whitman to the dictionary publisher. At the time he was a newspaper editor; he told the Merriams that he had written reviews of the 1847 dictionary but had not received his courtesy review copy. “If convenient, upon receipt of this,” he wrote, “I wish you would envelope a Dictionary and put on it my address.” He wrote the letter in April 1849, six years before the first edition of Leaves of Grass was published.

The week after Fatsis’s IU event, we began a unit on Whitman in my high school English course. I kept thinking about this Merriam letter, so I emailed the Lilly Library staff to ask about it and they arranged a material request for me. After a few weeks, I received a three-page scan: two of Whitman’s letter, and one of a typed transcript, presumably by Kripke:

I do somewhat suspect that the fascination I have with Kripke’s collection is due, in part, to my proximity to it. I plan to go back to Lilly before the summer to spend more time than I was able to last time looking at each displayed artifact.

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During his time at Merriam-Webster, Fatsis wrote definitions that are currently in the online dictionary at m-w.com. Chapter 4, “define,” answers what 7-year-old Kelton wondered: Who writes these definitions, and how? Throughout the book, and particularly in this chapter, we learn about the process that lexicographers and other M-W staffers go through: citations, first usage, and crafting the definition itself.

Chapters 9, “slur,” and 10, “pronoun,” outline two aspects of the English language that are quite fascinating. In chapter 10, for example, I learned that alternative, non-gendered pronouns such as “ze” or “xe” aren’t yet entered in Merriam-Webster because nearly all instances of their use refer to the pronouns themselves, rather than actually referring to people.

Chapters 12 and 13, “social media” and “news,” are about the ways that new media are changing the way dictionaries are (and aren’t) used. Twelve talks through Merriam-Webster’s social media presence and marketing techniques, including risky ones when Trump was first elected as president in 2016, that helped the company keep its name in people’s minds.

Chapter 14 was about artificial intelligence. AI is of very little interest to me. The chapter covered the possibility and feasibility of AI lexicography.

Chapters 15 and 16, “future” and “end,” outline the industry’s murky forecast. It’s unlikely that an updated print dictionary will be published in the future. Fatsis asks questions like, how will the future of dictionaries be funded? The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, has never made a profit, and is funded by the university. The U.S. government is certainly not in a place where it will fund a large-scale lexicographical project, so how will the American English language continue to be recorded the way dictionaries have done for the last two centuries?

“Unabridged” opened a door to an industry I hardly gave thought to. Sure, the book is really just a word nerd nerding out about words, but he does it so masterfully. This book was a fascinating deep dive into the world of lexicography that I didn’t know I wanted.