The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary debuted in 1888; it was missing the word “bondmaid.” It took 50 years to ...

A critic faulted Webster’s Third in the 1960s for its “extreme tolerance of crude neologisms.” Similar complaints abound in ...

Happy Dictionary Day, word-nerds! This is the official holiday in which we celebrate the birth of Noah Webster, who would be 254 years old if he were still living and breathing on this planet. Webster ...

At the risk of showing my age, I will admit that I began school before the advent of spell-check. When I didn't know how to spell a word, my teachers told me to look it up in the dictionary. I never ...

In a previous post, I discussed Noah Webster's compulsive nature. His "touch of madness" -- his obsession with compiling and organizing information of all sorts -- enabled him to devote thirty years ...

He’d hoped to chronicle the company’s long-awaited overhaul of its online unabridged dictionary, the first major undertaking ...

The new edition might remind people that a physical book from a source with a two-century-old pedigree might be more ...

In the United States, the name Noah Webster (1758-1843) is synonymous with the word dictionary. But it is also synonymous with the idea of America, since his first unabridged American Dictionary of ...

Imagine that you are an author and your editor assigns you the task of compiling a massive reference work — say, a dictionary — from scratch. This gargantuan project would likely induce feelings of ...

Dictionaries are deceptively simple, and incredibly ambitious. NPR's Don Gonyea talks to Stefan Fatsis about his book, "Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) The Modern Dictionary." ...