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‘Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary’: People of the (big, red) book

When I turned 13, I entered a part of the life cycle cherished by all Jewish kids and dreaded by their parents. This was the year of bar and bat mitzvahs—my own, but also those of friends, relatives, ...
Christian Science Monitor

‘Unabridged’: A delightful look behind the making of a dictionary

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...
The New Yorker

Is the Dictionary Done For?

Once, every middle-class home had a piano and a dictionary. The purpose of the piano was to be able to listen to music before phonographs were available and affordable. Later on, it was to torture ...
The New York Times

Hip, Woke, Cool: It’s All Fodder For the Oxford Dictionary of African American English

The new lexicon, with Henry Louis Gates Jr. as editor in chief, will collect definitions and histories of words. “The bottom line of the African American people,” Gates said, is “these are people who ...
Harper's Magazine

Oxford English dictionary (Book)

From forty-nine citations that the Oxford English Dictionary attributes to the book Meanderings of Memory, by an author known only as Nightlark, believed to have been published in 1852. In… ...