Merriam-Webster Just Made a Rare Move, With 5K New Words

Word nerd alert: Merriam-Webster announced Thursday that it has taken the rare step of fully revising and reimagining one of its most popular dictionaries with a fresh edition that adds more than 5,000 new words, including "petrichor," "teraflop," "dumbphone," and "ghost kitchen." The 12th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary comes 22 years after the book's last hard-copy update and amid declining US sales for analog dictionaries overall, according to Circana BookScan. It will be released Nov. 18, with preorders now available.

• Meanings: Petrichor is a pleasant odor after a rainfall following a warm, dry period. Teraflop is a unit of measure for calculating the speed of a computer. Dumbphones are just that—mobile devices without all the bells and whistles that we used before the smartphone revolution. And ghost kitchens, which came into their own during the pandemic, are commercial spaces for hire.

• Other additions: Also making it into the new edition are "rizz," "dad bod," "hard pass," "adulting," and "cancel culture." There's also "beast mode," "dashcam," "doomscroll," "WFH," and "side-eye." The new Collegiate also includes enhanced entries for some top lookups, and more than 20,000 new usage examples. All of the added words were already available on Merriam-Webster.com.
• More: The new Collegiate introduces curated word lists, such as words from the 1990s and "10 Words for Things That Often Go Unnamed." And it has more word histories: For instance, did you know "calculate" comes from the Latin for pebble, because ancient Romans used little stones to do addition and subtraction?

• Making room: The company removed two sections of the Collegiate's 11th edition that had sparse biographical and geographical entries to make room for the new content. Greg Barlow, Merriam-Webster's president, said ahead of the announcement that people no longer use dictionaries to learn such things as the location of Kalamazoo or who Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was. For that, they reach for the internet. Merriam-Webster also eliminated some obscure and antiquated words, including "enwheel," meaning to encircle.
• Aesthetics: For incredibly granular dictionary fans, the new Collegiate preserves lettered thumb notches—those little fingersize dents along the edges of reference book pages—to make browsing easier. The only printer doing the notches in the US has closed since Merriam-Webster was last in need, so it had to go to India, says Barlow.

More here.