Coming up on Word Matters, the invention of the modern dictionary.
I'm Emily Brewster,
and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Amin Shea, Peter Sokolowski,
and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
The earliest dictionaries were the fruit of one person's labor.
That fruit typically taking decades to ripen into something suitable for a desk or a bookshelf.
But in 1864, a dictionary of another kind was born,
and it forever changed the way lexicography was done.
Peter sets the stage.
We often do think of the dictionary as kind of an eternal document,
like it was always already there.
And we have learned by encounters with the public or even emails or letters that some people really do think that they're upset when the dictionary changes at all.
I liked the dictionary I used when I was in school or when I was young.
People do resist language change when it's represented in the dictionary sometimes.
But there is a sense of the dictionary being kind of like the Bible or like the Constitution,
something that really is fixed, is not something that changes.
But here's the big surprise, which is that without revision, dictionaries die.
In 2022, when we're talking about this,
we can only think of a handful of dictionaries that come up in conversation often,