Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong, and I can't think of a better crowd

than this one. Yes, I'm talking to you, who might be hyped to get for Christmas, a book

about the dictionary. Thankfully, Stefan Fatsis has just written that book. It's titled

Unabridged The Thrill of and Threat to the Modern Dictionary. And as you can tell from that title, it's not and threat to the modern dictionary.

And as you can tell from that title, it's not just a history of the dictionary and some of the spicier fights over including certain words, but it's also an exploration of what the future

of the dictionary looks like in the world of AI.

His interview with NPR's Don Gagne, after the break.

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It's a deceptively simple book and at the same time impossibly ambitious.

It's utilitarian but also incredibly erudite.

I'm talking about the dictionary.

For many decades, dictionaries were bestsellers and seen as the authority on the English language. But the internet and more recently artificial intelligence

have transformed how we get information, including definitions of words. Stefan Fatsis has written about all of this in his new book, Unabridged, The Thrill of, and Threat

to the Modern Dictionary.

He joins us now from our studio, New York.

Stefan, welcome to the show.

Great to be with you, Don.

So let's start with a little history.

I think we've all heard the name Webster,

but who was he? Noah Webster was a newspaper publisher, a politician, a revolutionary,

...