Review: A Saint's Calling (A Review Of Merriam-Webster's 12th Edition Dictionary)

By Hugh Blanton

 

Twelve years in the making, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary Twelfth Edition has finally rolled off the presses. At 2¢ a page our 1,827 page tome is a bargain—the Reader's Library Classics version of The Great Gatsby will set you back 6¢ a page (the Scribner's version will run you 8¢ a page). Our previous edition of the Collegiate Dictionary only needed 1,623 pages to get its point across and even came with biographical and geographical sections in the back. Both of those sections have now been cut, M-W president Greg Barlow saying that people don't go to the dictionary for that stuff anymore, they now use the internet. (Newsflash, President Barlow, they do that for word definitions too.) The sections also needed to be cut to make room for the five-thousand new words we get. Five-thousand!

 

The Twelfth Edition's first entry is the same as the Eleventh's: ¹a. We close with Zyrtec, which we are informed is a trademark and is defined as "used for a preparation of the hydrochloride of cetirizine." In the Eleventh edition our penultimate entry was Zwolle, a city in Netherlands, which has now been cut despite having a Michelin starred restaurant (De Librije, located at Spinhuisplein 1, reservations required). The longest word is—get ready for this—pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, "a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine ash and dust." Most folks just call it silicosis. (Close scrutiny reveals it contains the words 'microscopic' and 'volcano'.) This stumps many a player at bar trivia night; it's commonly believed that supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is the longest word, but that word doesn't even make an appearance in Merriam-Webster's dictionary. You have to cross the pond and crack open the Oxford English Dictionary if you want its definition. (adj extremely good or wonderful.)

 

The Twelfth Edition keeps the thumb notches that word hounds love in their dictionaries, but Merriam-Webster had to hire a printer overseas to do it—no American printers can handle the job anymore. 'S' is the only letter that gets its own dedicated thumb notch. 'S' words begin on page 1,391 and go all the way to page 1,600. In this section we find perhaps the most difficult of all words to define: set. Set's definition runs amok for 116 lines (Edgar Allan Poe only needed 108 lines to give us "The Raven" and had the less vexing task). Definition 4d: "to put aside (as dough containing yeast) for fermenting." 17a: "to adorn with something affixed or infixed : STUD, DOT <clear sky ~ with stars>." ²set 14 "also sett : a rectangular paving stone of sandstone or granite." The irony of all this is that pretty much nobody looks up 'set' anyway. Lexicography is a saint's calling.

 

Richard Chenevix Trench, the former Dean of Westminster, wrote in 1851, "Many a single word...is itself a concentrated poem, having stores of poetical thought and imagery laid up in it." He undoubtedly had some of those Shakespeare-invented words in mind, but The Bard also invented a few words that are now just practical and prosaic: eyeball: "the more or less globular capsule of the vertebrate eye formed by the sclera and cornea together with their contained structures." (Globular!) Shakespeare also gave us swagger: "to conduct oneself in an arrogant or superciliously pompous manner; esp : to walk with an air of overbearing self-confidence." He needed such a word for Nick Bottom, the arrogant weaver in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Now swagger is what WWE wrestlers do as their intro music plays. Musicians often turn to the dictionary looking for words "of poetical thought and imagery" to name their bands. Trumpet player William King ran his fingers over dictionary pages and came up with The Commodores to name his. I hate to think that if he'd been just a tad bit lazy or tired that day we might have been listening to "Three Times a Lady" by The Commodes.

 

Petrichor is one of the five-thousand new words listed even though its first usage dates back to 1964. Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Grenfell Thomas invented it out of the words petra (Ancient Greek for rock) and ichor (blood of the gods). "pleasant odor that is associated with rainfall." M-W might have felt compelled to finally add it after incessant overuse by contemporary poets. Also making its M-W debut is rizz ("n, slang : romantic appeal or charm"), shortened from the word charisma. Rizz was OED's 2023 Word of the Year, noting that Gen Z is creating and defining its own language (Swiftie was a nominee for the title as well). I'm fine with Gen Z's language innovations up to a point, but if they succeed in replacing "couldn't care less" with "could care less" I'll have to rebel. Another first-time entry is farm-to-table, even though its first usage is in 1914 when the USDA launched a program by that name to connect city folk with rural producers via the postal system. The Millennials popularized it with those annoying farmer's markets that pop up every Sunday morning in the middle of uptown district city streets. And then there are those words that have been determined to be obsolete and given the boot; goodbye enwheel, we hardly knew you ("obs : ENCIRCLE").

 

Also new in the Twelfth Edition are sectioned off areas within the columns. Directly beneath the entry for fatuous we get a bordered square titled "10 Words to Describe Undesirable Qualities." Oddly, the first one listed is fatuous, it's definition repeated verbatim. Then there's "insipid," there's "obtuse," and we also get "twee—excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint." (In a recent piece for a lit mag I included the word twee and the editor asked me if it was a misspelling of a word he could not determine.) It's taken from British baby talk for "sweet." However, its use in popular culture is usually as a "twee girl," an aesthetic characterized by vintage styles and kitschy items linked to indie films and music. Taylor Swift was considered a "twee girl" in her Red Era, when she pivoted from country music to pop. Certainly her producers, hauling huge bags of money to the bank,  would not have considered twee to be an "undesirable quality." 

 

Are there enough word nerds to keep the printed dictionary alive? Circana BookScan reported in the twelve month period ended September 6, 2025 dictionary sales fell nine percent compared with the same period the previous year. Merriam-Webster sells about 1.5 million dictionaries a year. Fans of the word inkorrect, a word coined by Philip Bladon to indicate incorrect usage of "k" in writing, were livid that it was not included in the Twelfth Edition, and vented their rage in Amazon one-star reviews. Will inkorrect make it into the Thirteenth Edition? Bladon and his minions have been after M-W since 1993 to get their creation included. (Inkorrect indicates improper abbreviation of kilograms to Kg, when it should be kg. Ditto kilometers.) Even without inkorrect, Merriam-Webster's Twelfth Edition is a superb value and devoted logophiles are already waiting with bated breath for the Thirteenth.

 

 

 

 

 

Hugh Blanton's latest book is The Pudneys (Anxiety Press). He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5