Grammar Girl here. I'm Injan Fogarty, and today I'm here with Erin McKean, lexicographer, and

founder of the online dictionary WordNick. Erin, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.

Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, you bet. So, you know, I've always been curious.

What inspires someone to actually start a dictionary?

Well, I'd actually been working on dictionaries for a long time before starting WordNick.

I actually always have wanted to work on dictionary since I was a little girl since I was like eight years old.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. And so I worked for some

children's dictionaries. I worked on the Thorndyke-Barnhart Children's Dictionaries right after, actually

even before I graduated from college, I started as an intern and I worked there for like seven years.

And then I worked for Oxford University Press and I was the editor-in-chief of American dictionaries,

again, for like a biblical term of seven years.

And then, Warnick started its, like, online life as a venture-backed startup.

And so sometimes people who want to do startups come to me and be like, how did you do a startup?

And I'm like, this is not like a replicatable path. You know,

like start out as a dictionary editor and then give a talk at the TED conference. And then in the

audience have someone who really likes your idea of having an online dictionary that has all the

words. And then they like walk away and find somebody else to talk to.

Was that the thesis of your TED talk that a dictionary should have all the words?

Yeah. I mean, the internet is infinite. There's no real, I mean, there are plenty of reasons

why traditional dictionaries don't have all the words. And at the end of the day, they all come

down to money and time, right? Those are the big constraints of everything.

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