The Slow Decline of Urban Dictionary

There was a time when Urban Dictionary felt essential. Twenty-six years ago, when then-college freshman Aaron Peckham founded ...
MIT Technology Review

The Anatomy of the Urban Dictionary

The Urban Dictionary is a crowdsourced website that records new words and their meanings. It began life in 1999 as a parody of Dictionary.com but has since become an important resource on the Web.
The New Yorker

Annotating the First Page of the First Navajo-English Dictionary

The first, incomplete Navajo-English Dictionary was compiled, in 1958, by Leon Wall, an official in the U.S. government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. Wall, who was in charge of a literacy program on the ...
Los Angeles Times

The belated books of 2010: The First English Dictionary of Slang, 1699

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts. Some books landed on my desk in 2010 and sat patiently, waiting their ...
Mental Floss

10 Facts About Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary

World Dictionary Day takes place on October 16, the birthday of the American lexicographer Noah Webster, whose enormous, two-volume An American Dictionary of the English Language—published in 1828, ...
The New Yorker

Is the Dictionary Done For?

The print edition of Merriam-Webster was once a touchstone of authority and stability. Then the internet brought about a ...
Slate

The Definition of a Dictionary

Noah Webster published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language in 1806. His 1828 follow-up contained 70,000 entries. By 1864, the collection had 114,000 ...