Sarno tours Merriam-Webster on National Dictionary Day

Oct. 22, 2015 | G. Michael Dobbs
news@thereminder.com

Merriam-Webster President and Publisher John Morse explained to Mayor Domenic Sarno how the company’s editors use an extensive system of files to update the definitions of words.
Reminder Publications photo by G. Michael Dobbs

SPRINGFIELD – Oct. 16 may have been just another Friday for some, but for the employees at Merriam-Webster the publishers of the nation’s best-known dictionary, among other reference books, it was a holiday to be noted.

It was Noah Webster’s birthday, designated as National Dictionary Day.

To help celebrate, Merriam-Webster President and Publisher John Morse invited Mayor Domenic Sarno for a tour of the company’s headquarters. There the company’s 60 employees produce reference books, but also operate the Merriam-Webster website (www.merriam-webster.com), one of the busiest sites on the web with 100 million page views a month, Director of Marketing Meghan Longhi noted.

Using a newly installed historical display, Morse explained how George and Charles Merriam, who had a book and stationary shop in Springfield, bought the rights to Noah Webster’s “An American Dictionary of the English Language, Corrected and Enlarged” in 1843. Webster had compiled the most well known American dictionary, which helped define the differences between the English spoken and written here as opposed to Great Britain.

Webster also helped standardized the spelling of American English through his books.

According to the company’s official history, the Merriam brothers not only had the foresight of buying the rights of Webster’s dictionary from his estate, but then employed Webster’s son and son-in-law. Both were prominent scholars who continued Webster’s work for future editions.  

Morse brought Sarno upstairs to a group of file cabinets. He opened one at random and pulled out a card. These cards, he explained, “are the heart of what we do.” On them are not just words, but references to how they have been used and their origin.

Morse explained the challenges for the dictionary’s editors is to not only add words that have been introduced to the language but to monitor words to see if additional meanings have been attached to them.

He said the staff watches for slang that has become a permanent part of the language.

“Language just does not belong to the intellectual or the socially elite,” Morse said. He added that 1,3000 new word had been added this year to the unabridged dictionary maintained on the company’s website.

He said each editor receives a group of galley proofs to be reviewed and each word is checked “to make sure the dictionary cover all the ways the language is being used.”

The editors look at how a word is being used from different sources, Morse said.

Editors watch for new words in a variety of places. Morse cited comic strips, as well as sports and entertainment coverage, as well as key places to find new words or new meanings.
In the 11th Collegiate Dictionary there were 100,000 changes that were each examined by 10 editors, he said.

He said judging jargon, technical language used by a profession, is big part of the changes in an edition. Morse used the example of “macular degeneration,”  a medical term which is now widely used by the general public.

Morse said that in this day of spellcheck on computers, some people might not think a dictionary is used as much. What he and others have found is the people still use it for definitions.

Longhi said that in a digital age the sales of traditional hard copy dictionaries are strong because not all schools have computers and Internet access for all students.

Morse introduced Sarno to the Merriam-Webster editor with the longest tenure, James G. Lowe, who edited the Official Scrabble Dictionary and is a consultant with the National Spelling Bee. Low has been with the company for 47 years.

“I love it; that’s why I stayed so long,” he explained. Lowe added an additional motivation is that “I “learn something new everyday.”

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