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.