A fun nonfiction read from the author of Word Slut. This one discusses his time working for Miriam Webster dictionary and discusses how dictionaries are constructed and updated and how and where new words arrive in the common language. Fun and interesting.

‘Unabridged’ by Stefan Fatsis is such an impressive and well-researched gem of a book.

It is a dream come true for the English language lovers. I cannot recommend it enough.

Many thanks to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for the e-ARC.

I received an advance copy of this book on NetGalley and so here’s my review.

I’m a huge word nerd and was very excited to find this book. I really enjoyed the first half. The author described the history of the Merriam-Webster dictionary and how words came to be included: how they were researched, defined, recorded.
I did have a harder time with the second half of the book. I felt that while the author did try otherwise, his biases, both political and social, did show through. This is not necessarily a downfall of the book, but as his biases are different than mine, it made certain chapters less interesting to me.
I was fascinated by the level of research and the history included in the book. It was well-organized and the chapter titles, well, rather enchanted me.
I would recommend it to other fans of words and the English language, but as I probably won’t read it again and don’t think I’ll get a print copy of the book, it gets 3 stars from me.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing this ARC.

If you're a dictionary nerd, you'll love this and you shouldn't even need me to tell you that. Just go and read it.

If you're not a dictionary nerd, but have some curiousity about dictionaries or words in general, then I still think this will be a super fun read for you.

This book was exactly what I expected it to be in the best possible way and now I need to go back and read the other books this author has written.

4.5 stars, happily rounded to 5.

Fatsis embedded himself at storied Merriam-Webster where he saw how words are created….or at least how words make the dictionary. He takes a deep dive into the history of dictionaries, especially in the U.S. through looking at the history of Merriam-Webster and its archives, learned how one writes good definitions, how slurs and pronouns are handled and, basically, where words come from and who decides what they mean. He writes some definitions himself and votes on the Word of the Year, which sounds like such fun, and much more during his foray into the world of lexicographers.

Oh, this made my little word nerd heart sing! Fatsis wrote WORD FREAK, a book about competitive Scrabble players which is one of my all-time favorites, so I fully expected to live this and I wasn’t disappointed. I could have marked hundreds of interesting little tidbits to include in a review, but if you are the least bit interested in this, you just need to enjoy it for yourself. I found that it was best to read smaller bits at a time, to savor. And it has a hundred pages of end notes that look nearly as fascinating as the book itself! Oh, Stefan, thank you so much for this! Bonus fun fact for reading my review: word most often searched for in MW online? Paradigm.