Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

I hadn’t just fallen down this rabbit hole: I saw that hole in the distance and ran full tilt at it, throwing myself headlong into it.

Emily Brewster, who has been an editor at Merriam-Webster for over fifteen years, sums up the secret longing of every lexicographer: “Yes, this is what I want to do. I want to sit alone in a cubicle all day and think about words and not really talk to anybody else. That sounds great!”

Who thought that “pumpernickel” was a good name for a dark rye bread? Because when you trace the word back to its German origins, you find it means “fart goblin,”*5 and now you cannot help but blench and giggle whenever you see pumpernickel.

That means, in short, that the pronunciation editor gets to spend all day watching TV. (Josh hesitates. “I spend more time on YouTube,” he says.)

Peter Sokolowski remembers being in the hallway outside the pronunciation editor’s office one day and hearing from within the office a very measured voice say, as blandly as possible, “Motherfucker. Motherfucker. Motherfucker.” It was one of our old pronunciation editors, trying to get the intonation right for the audio file. He left a few years later to become a priest.