Word NERD Alert: Merriam-Wbster announced on Thursday that it had taken a rare step from reviewing and re-imagining one of its most popular dictionaries with a new edition that adds more than 5,000 new words, including “Petrichor”, “Teraflop”, “Dumbphone” and “Ghost Kitchen.”
The twelfth edition The “Merriam-Webster” group comes 22 years after the latest update of the hardline book and amid the United States’ sales to analog texts in general, according to Circana Bookscan. It will be released on November 18, with precedent now.
Petrichor, by the way, is a pleasant smell after the rain after a warm dry period. Teraflop is a computer speed measurement unit. The blood is just the mobile devices that we used before the smartphone revolution. Ghost kitchens, which entered the epidemic, are commercial areas of rental.
Other additions: “cold drink”, “farm to a table”, ” “Rees,” “Abi Bod”, “solid pass”, “butter” and “cancellation of culture”. There is also a “monster mode”, “Dashcam”, “Doomscroll,”“WFH” And “side eye”.
The new “Collegate” also includes improved entries for some higher searches, and more than 20,000 new examples of use. All the added words were It is already available on Merriam Webster.com.
How do they give way to all of this?
The company removed two parts of the eleventh edition of the “Collegate’s”, which contains geographical and geographical biography to make room for the new content. Greg Barlo, President of Merriam-WebSter, told Associated Press before announcing that people no longer use dictionaries to learn things like Calmanazo or who was Nikolai Raimsky Korsakov. Therefore, they reach the Internet.
(It is a city in southwest Michigan, for the sake of curiosity forever, a Russian author who died in 1908.)
The Merria-Webster also canceled some mysterious and ancient words, including “Enwheel”, which means hoops.
“We wanted to make the” university “more useful, better and more interesting design,” said Barlo. “We wanted to be more feasible to browsing, more fun to look through it, and to be practical for research, but also a beautiful book.”
What happens with dictionary sales in general?
The “collective” update weighs the chunky linen, about 5 pounds. This comes as sales of reference books for adults, including dictionaries and Aglas, which have shown annual declines since 2022, according to Circuana Bookscan, which captures 85 % of the printing market. In the 12 -month period ending on September 6, the dictionary sales decreased by 9 % compared to the same previous period.
Merriam-WebSter, the country’s leading dictionary company, sells about 1.5 million of them annually. Parlow said that most of them were revised regularly, but it was not fully repaired like the “university”. He said that the company’s retail sales in general have been generally fixed in the past few years. Calculate print sales for a small part of the company’s revenue.
“Although the dictionary of printing is not important at all for the growth and profitability of this wonderful language company, our heart is still.” There are people there Whoever loves books only, We love books. ”
For dictionary sales in general, there are few sunlight in Barnes and Nobel. Kat Sarvas, director of marketing in my story, said that the sales of the dictionary in the series have increased so far this year during the same period in 2024. She pointed to similar increases for such reference materials such as The US Constitution as well.
“I think there is nostalgia that people should be able to pull a dictionary from the shelf and search for a word,” said Sarvas. “There is a specific desire to obtain these types of reference materials at home. It may be what people feel, as educated people, we must have.”
Dictionaries may decrease, but they have not yet died
While Merriam-WebSter, “Collegia”, originally focused on the needs of university students, among the senior sellers in the Barnes and Nobel dictionaries, its public interest “The Merriam-WEBSter Dictionary” is more popular. Sarvas said it was last modified in 2022. The pocket version is also a strong seller.
Grant Barrett, a miracle, a former dictionary editor of the University of Oxford, and the host of “Words with Words”, said that the death of printed dictionaries has been ringing since the appearance of the Internet.
He said: “We are now in this strange forgetfulness where people want the dictionary but they do not want to pay for it, because they are used to getting things free on the Internet.”
Barlo said that the Merriam-Webster is receiving about one billion visits annually, making the company a digital leader as well. Over the past ten years, revenues have generally grown by about 500 % on the strength of their online dictionary, thesauus, Apps Mobile, and word games.
The new “Collegeate” offers coordinated words, such as words from the nineties and “10 words for things that are often not named.” He has more history history. Did you know that “account” comes from Latin for “Pebble”, because the ancient Romans used small stones to press and put off?
For incredibly the fans of the granular dictionary, the new “university” maintains the broken thumbs-those small scratches the size of the finger along the edges of the pages of reference books-to make browsing easier. Barlo said that the only printer in the United States has been closed since Myriam Wester was another needed, so she had to go to India.
Why are the printing dictionaries still important?
Printed versions are still important in preserving cultures, such as gifts, such as a family tool, and students under the ban of mobile phones in school, among other reasons, Sarvas, Parrett and other books of books said.
“There are many societies that speak languages that have not been documented at all, and they may not have not been documented because these languages may have been actively suppressed. I think about indigenous communities throughout North America,” said Lindsay Rose Russell, Executive Director of the Dictionary Association in North America.
“The presence of a printed dictionary has indicated to some extent the legitimacy of the language,” said Russell, an author studying English at the University of Illinois at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champin.
Barrett said that his accompanying podcast program receives many letters from readers who give an insight into how dictionaries are used.
He said: “Some people use the dictionary as almost a contemplative resource, as they only open it and see what they find and a kind of their minds wandering a little.”
Did you get a band in need of a name? Russell noted that William King, the trumpet player in Commodores, used a dictionary to find his finger, and runs his finger at the bottom of a page.
“We have been lucky,” King told People magazine in 1978.
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