Grammar Girl here. I'm In Jan Fogarty, and today I am here with Peter Sackalowski,

editor at large at Merriam Webster, and we are going to talk about the new print, print 12th edition

of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. Peter, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.

It's so great to see you again and to be

with you. Thanks. Yeah, you too. Well, you know, this new print dictionary just felt like a huge

surprise. I mean, how long has it been since Marion Webster published a print dictionary?

Right. Well, we still publish a lot of print dictionaries, but a new edition of a collegiate,

22 years.

The fact is the collegiate came out on years ending with three for a long time,

1963, 73, 83, it was like clockwork.

But after 2003, the 11th collegiate, of course, you can kind of think 2003 social media starts

around 2006, 7, and our kind of internet environment that we know today really was formed

around those years. And of course, our online dictionary became the principal product.

The online dictionary was originally based on the collegiate dictionary,

and so we kept revising it as we always had, but there hasn't been a new fully revised print

edition in 22 years, and so it is a big deal. Yeah, how long has the print edition been

in the works? Well, it takes a couple of years. I mean, we had it down to a kind of science. It was always like two years, 20, 22 months for the entire staff, all hands on deck to revise the collegiate. The idea behind a revision is that every fact of every entry is checked. That's a tall order. It's a very difficult thing to do. It's something we always

tried, for example, the dates, the etymological dates on entries. We want to go through,

once through, and check every one of them to make sure that we don't have new information,

new dates, but of course, new senses of existing words. New words are the obvious thing. And the kind of job is revision.

So what happens is we decided to do it and we decided to keep it a secret while it was in

production. And so we just announced whatever it was a few weeks ago. And it's kind of an exciting moment.

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