NEW YORK (AP) – Word Geek Alert: Merriam-Webster announced Thursday it has taken the unusual step of completely revising and rethinking one of its most popular dictionaries with a fresh edition that adds over 5,000 new words, including “Petrichor”, “Teraflop”, “Dumbphone” and “Dumbphone”. “Ghost Kitchen.”
12th Edition The book “Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary” comes 22 years after the book’s last hard copy update, with US sales of Analog Dictionaries dropping, according to Circana Bookscan. It was released on November 18th, and pre-orders are now available.
Incidentally, Petrichol has a comfortable smell after a warm, dry period followed by a rainfall. Teraflop is a unit of measurement for calculating computer speed. The Damphone is truly a mobile device used before the smartphone revolution. And the ghost kitchen, which has come by himself during the pandemic, is a commercial space for employment.
Other additions: “Cold Brew”, “Table from the Farm”, “Liz” “Dad”, “Hard Pass”, “Adult”, “Cancel Culture”. There are also “Beast Mode” and “Dash Cam” “Doomscroll”“WFH” And “Side eye.”
The new “university” also includes several top lookup extension entries, as well as over 20,000 new use cases. All the words added were Already available at Merriam-Webster.com.
How did they create space for everything?
The company has removed two sections in “Collegiate’s” 11th edition, which is sparsely biographical and geographical entries to make room for new content. Merriam-Webster President Greg Barlow told The Associated Press exclusively ahead of the announcement that he no longer uses dictionaries to learn about places in Kalamazoo or things like Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov. For that reason, they reach for the internet.
(It is a city in southwestern Michigan, and is forever curious, so he is a Russian composer who died in 1908.)
Merriam-Webster has eliminated some obscure, outdated words, including “Enweel,” which means Encircle.
“We wanted to make ‘university’ more convenient, better design, more interesting,” Barlow said. “We wanted it to be more rewarding to view, more fun outlooks and practical for research, but it was also a beautiful book.”
What is happening in dictionary sales in general?
The “University” update with chunky and linen cover weighs nearly 5 pounds. This is because sales of dictionaries and adult reference books, including atlase, have been showing an annual decline since 2022, according to Circana Bookscan, which has earned 85% of the printing market. Dictionary sales fell 9% compared to the previous period for the 12-month period ending June 6th.
Merriam-Webster, a leading dictionary company in the country, sells around 1.5 million people a year. Most are regularly revised, but not completely overhauled like “university,” Barlow said. The company’s retail sales have generally been stable over the last few years, he said. Print sales accounts for just a small portion of the company’s revenue.
“Printed dictionary is not important at all to the growth and profitability of this amazing language company, but it’s still our hearts,” Barlow said. “There’s a person there. People who like books, And we love books. ”
Overall, the dictionary sales will have a bit of sunshine on Barnes & Noble. Non-fiction marketing manager Kat Sarfas said the chain’s dictionary sales have increased this year in the same period in 2024. She also noted similar increases for references such as: The same goes for the US Constitution.
“I think there’s a nostalgia where people need to be able to pull the dictionary out of the shelf and look up the words,” Sulfus said. “There’s a desire to have these types of references in your home. That might be something we, as educated people, think we should own.”
The dictionary may be down, but it’s not dead yet
Originally focusing on the needs of university students, Merriam-Webster’s “university” is one of the top sellers in Barnes & Noble’s dictionary, but its general profit “The Merriam-Webster Dictionary” is more popular. It was last tweaked in 2022. The pocket version is also a powerful seller, Sarfas said.
Since the rise of the internet, the confession of the death of print dictionary has been ringing, and dictionary editor Grant Barrett, a former dictionary editor such as Merriam-Webster, is a co-host of Public Radio’s “Way With Words.”
“Now we’re in this weird limbo, where people want a dictionary, but they’re used to getting things for free on the internet, so they don’t want to pay for it,” he said.
The Merriam-Webster website receives approximately 1 billion visits a year, and it is visiting the company and digital leaders alike. Over the past decade, overall revenue has grown by nearly 500% in the strength of online dictionary, thesaurus, mobile apps and word games.
The new “university” presents a curated list of words, including words from the 1990s. And it has more word history. Did you know that “calculation” comes from the Latin word “Pabble” because ancient Romans used small stones to add and subtract?
And for incredibly granular dictionary fans, the new “university” stores small finger-sized dents along the edges of the pages of reference books to make browsing easier. The only printer in the US notching had to go to India as Merriam Webster was closed because he was in trouble the last time, Barlow said.
Why is a printing dictionary still important?
The advantages of Sarfas, Barrett and other books state that the printed version is still important for students under the phone, as gifts, gifts, household items, and for students under the phone.
“There are many communities that speak languages that have never been documented and may be actively restrained, so they may not be documented,” said Lindsay Rose Russell, executive director of the North American Dictionary Association.
“If you have a printed dictionary, there are all kinds of things, as if you are justifying the language,” says Russell, who also teaches English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Barrett said his show and its companion podcasts receive many letters from readers who give insight into how to use the dictionary.
“Some people use the dictionary as an almost contemplative resource and open it up and see what they find and make their minds wander a little,” he said.
Have you got a band that needs a name? Commo dress trumpet player William King used a dictionary to find him and ran his fingers down the page, Russell pointed out.
“We were lucky,” King told People Magazine in 1978. ”
