October 16 is World Dictionary Day, marking the birthday of the great American lexicographer Noah Webster, who was born in what is now West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1758. Webster’s two-volume An ...

Earlier this year, we wrote about Dictionary.com’s nifty iPhone app. Since April, the app has seen 3 million downloads and is steadily growing in popularity. Today, Dictionary.com (which as part of ...

The great lexicographers understood that a worthy dictionary was descriptive, not prescriptive. It would simply record what we’ve already agreed upon socially You can save this article by registering ...

As slang finds its way into lexical institutions, experts ponder its place on the internet. By Julia Carpenter There was a time when Urban Dictionary felt essential. Twenty-six years ago, when ...

Once, every middle-class home had a piano and a dictionary. The purpose of the piano was to be able to listen to music before phonographs were available and affordable. Later on, it was to torture ...

David Skinner’s wonderful book, The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published, arrives in paperback tomorrow. The following transcript is adapted from ...

A dictionary is a list of words or phrases and their definitions arranged in alphabetical order. In an English dictionary you'll find words beginning with ‘a’ at the front and ‘z’ at the back. There ...