Coming up on Word Matters, bilingual dictionaries.
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 explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
While the dictionary at Merriam-Webster.com and the Bullseye Bedeck Hardcover Collegiate Dictionary it's based on are the best known of Merriam-Webster's dictionaries,
the company in fact publishes a significant number of other dictionaries,
among them bilingual dictionaries.
One of the co-hosts of Word Matters was hired expressly to work on one of these.
Up next, Peter Sokolowski answers all my questions about Merriam-Webster's bilingual lexicography.
Merriam-Webster gets the second part of its name,
of course, from Noah Webster, the father of American lexicography.
And for many, many years,
Merriam-Webster only produced dictionaries that would have been familiar to Noah Webster.
They were monolingual dictionaries of the English language
as it's used primarily in the United States.
But at some point, Merriam-Webster started making lots of other kinds of dictionaries,
too, including bilingual dictionaries.
Now, Peter, you came to the company as a bilingual lexicographer.
Is that right?
Yeah, that was the first project that I was working on.