Unabridged

A Book About the Dictionary in the Digital Age

By: Stefan Fatsis

Narrated by: Kevin R. Free

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Word Freak, a vibrant, lively, and illuminating journey through the exotic world of Merriam-Webster, dictionaries, and language, at a time of rapid-fire change in the way we create, consume, define, and use words.

Words are the currency of culture—and never more than today. From selfie to doomscrolling to rizz, our hyper-connected digital world coins and spreads new words with lightning speed and locks them into mainstream consciousness with unprecedented influence. Journalist and bestselling author Stefan Fatsis embedded as a lexicographer-in-training at America’s most famous dictionary publisher, Merriam-Webster, to learn how words get into the dictionary, where they come from, who decides what they mean, and how we write and think about them. In so doing, as he recounts in Unabridged, he discovered the history and fascinating subculture of the dictionary and of those who curate and revere “one of the most basic features of our collective humanity.”

Fatsis reveals the little-known story of how the brothers George and Charles Merriam acquired Noah Webster’s original American dictionary and reshaped the business of language forever. Merriam-Webster became America’s most successful and enduring compendium of words, withstanding intense competition and cultural controversies—only to be threatened by the power of Google and artificial intelligence today.

Delving into Merriam’s legendary archives and parsing its arcane rules, Fatsis learns the painstaking precision required for writing good definitions. He examines how the dictionary has handled the most explosive slurs and the revolutionary change in pronouns. He votes on the annual Word of the Year, travels to the legendary Oxford English Dictionary, and visits the world’s greatest private dictionary collection in a Greenwich Village apartment stuffed with more than 20,000 books. Fatsis demonstrates how words are weaponized in our polarized political culture—from liberal to woke to DEI—and, in a time of insurrections and pandemics, how they can be a literal matter of life and death. Along the way, he manages to write a few definitions that crack the code and are enshrined in the pixelated dictionary.

“I fell in love with the dictionary on my eleventh birthday,” Fatsis writes about the full-color college lexicon he received on that day. “The dictionary projects permanence, but the language is Jell-O, slippery and mutable and forever collapsing on itself.” Unabridged takes listeners to the heart of an industry in flux, celebrating as it does the sheer thrill and wonder of words.

The ins and outs of dictionaries

I own all the major dictionaries. OED2, NI2, NI3, RH2, MW11, Collins 2024, OAD3, AHD5, Except for Collins, there hasn't been a new printed dictionary for a decade. That changes next week (Nov 2025) with the release of Merriam-Webster Collegiate 12th, which Stefan Fatsis helped with. There isn't much mentioned about that book in this book.

However, there is a lot mentioned about the Oxford English Dictionary, the New International Dictionaries and versions of Merriam-Webster. Where is Merriam-Webster New International 4th Edition? Turns out, when Encyclopedia Britannica got bought out, the value of printed books was seen as low by the new owners. That's why the World Book Encyclopedia is the last of the printed dictionaries. The author goes into the gory details of the transition from Printed dictionaries to digital electronic dictionaries. Many of the people who worked on dictionaries were fired. For several discontinued dictionaries, the citation library got thrown away.

However, there was still life in the online dictionaries... leading to the battle between m-w.com and dictionary.com, along with other sites.

In all, an enjoyable listen. With the impending release of Merriam-Webster Collegiate 12th, things are not quite as bleak.