I’m again telling you about another of the 2026 Lit Lineup books that I’ve “read” this year. In fact, I’ve read none of them; I’ve listened to all of them. For me, listening has opened an entirely new world of enjoying books.
Stefan Fatsis wrote the book “Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary.”
Forty years after receiving Webster’s New World Dictionary for his 11th birthday, he visited the Springfield, Massachusetts, offices of America’s most famous dictionary publisher, Merriam-Webster.
He wanted to learn about their plan to overhaul Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, which had not been done in more than half a century. He embedded as a lexicographer-in-training/journalist-in-residence to learn where words come from, who decides what they mean, how they get into the dictionary, and how we write and think about them.
He defines each part of the book. “Dedication — a name and often a message prefixed to a literary, musical, or artistic production in tribute to a person or a cause.” While I found this entertaining, I won’t go on with the definitions of note, introduction or the various chapter titles.
Fatsis delves into the ancient history of the dictionary – to the third millenium BCE when Ancient Sumerians created a list of words, wedge-shaped marks of cuneiform script which were recorded on clay tablets.
I looked up Sumer. It’s the southernmost region of Mesopotamia (modern-day southern Iraq and parts of Kuwait), which has long been considered a cradle of civilization.
Fatsis doesn’t spend much time on the ancient history of dictionaries. Nor does he spend much time with the works predating Noah Webster’s 1828 Dictionary, the first distinctly American dictionary, featuring American vocabulary and spellings. He discusses the Merriam Brothers’ acquisition of the rights to Noah Webster’s 1828 work.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are the basis of modern chatbots, ChatGPT and Claude among many. The term was entered in the dictionary in 2023, defined as “a language model that utilizes deep see methods on an extremely large data set as a basis for predicting and constructing natural-sounding text.” Its first known use was in 2019.
Despite the success of modern chatbots, in 2024 an MIT economist wrote “It’s all but certain that current AI models won’t achieve anything close to the capabilities as smart as HAL 9000 in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ within the next 10 years.” Not surprisingly, AI is influencing dictionaries.
I learned so many things while listening to this book. I learned about Madeline Kripke, the American book collector who had amassed one of the largest collections of dictionaries. Her story is fascinating.
I learned how words are added to dictionaries.
I learned how the Word of the Year is chosen, and I was delighted to learn “dumpster fire” was the 2016 Word of the Year. I often wear a dumpster fire pin, which several people have asked me about. I bought mine at William Spears’ store in Juneau; the Homer Bookstore also carries his work.
I noted definitions of many new-to-me words. These are just three:
Promptitude: acting quickly and without delay.
Fistnote: note in a printed text marked by a symbol of a fist with a pointing index finger.
Meatmare: a nightmare experienced by a vegetarian in which they’re forced to eat meat.
I learned the definition of the word collocations, the habitual juxtaposition of a word with another word with greater than chance frequency. It turns out that we use collocations all the time, when we juxtapose the word do, make, have, or take with another word: do our best, make a mess, have a good time, or take a vacation.
According to Fatsis, “The dictionary projects permanence, but the language is Jell-O, slippery and mutable and forever collapsing on itself.” He also says the dictionary is “one of the most basic features of our collective humanity.”
I say that libraries are exactly that! Drop by your library this week! And tune in next Sunday morning for Reading Between the Lines.
Reading Between the Lines is a co-production of KBBI AM 890 and volunteers with the Friends of the Homer Library. It airs at 9:35 a.m. every Sunday on KBBI 890 AM and Seward 88.1 FM. These reviews are reprinted with permission from KBBI and the Friends of the Homer Library. Program recordings can be found at Reading Between the Lines.
Leave a Reply