If you look up “microaggression” or “sheeple” or “safe space” on the website of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the entries won’t have a byline—but their author is Stefan Fatsis. A longtime journalist who lives in AU Park, Fatsis is best known for his book Word Freak, about the world of competitive Scrabble. To report his new book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary, he became an amateur lexicographer and embedded with the team at Merriam-Webster, trying his hand at defining words while researching the history and inner workings of dictionary creation.

“If there’s one thing I learned, it’s just how sophisticated and complex the work of defining words is,” Fatsis says. “It requires so much effort to search databases for dozens of examples of a word being used i

See Full Page