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Computers, which were created in the 1940s to produce wartime ballistic firing tables, originally manipulated numbers. But since computational methods had helped to break enemy codes, Cold War resources were poured into computerizing dictionaries in…

For all its virtues, the newly supplemented OED could be a nuisance to use: words might appear in either or both of two separate alphabetical sequences. Burchfield was asked when the two would be merged. “Never,” he told Bryan Garner in July 1979.…

More than a century after George W. Ogilvie began his onslaught against Merriam, his successors at Webster’s New World—the lineage back to Ogilvie is direct—remained the most formidable competition for the newly renamed Merriam-Webster. American…

The death knell came in litigation that involved not copyright or trademark law but “trade dress”: the likelihood of confusion caused by similarly named products (the words Webster’s plus College) with a similar appearance. In a 1994 federal trial,…

Nineteen years after George W. Ogilvie’s death, and after nearly a decade of further litigation with Merriam, Ogilvie’s successor-in-interest, World Publishing, issued a four-page pamphlet that amounted to a victory lap: Merriam was enjoined against…

Throughout the mid-20th century, Merriam’s public-relations campaign urged people to think of Merriam’s dictionaries as the only ones legitimately called Webster. Among the intelligentsia, it was largely successful. Yet it wasn’t quite correct to say…

George W. Ogilvie asserted that in all the litigation over Webster dictionaries, Merriam had been “whipped, unqualifiedly and absolutely.” The trend continued when a case came before Judge Learned Hand in 1917. By now, Ogilvie had issued Webster…

In 1914, Ogilvie pushed for federal legislation to allow anyone to publish Webster dictionaries with impunity. The corrupt Chair of the House Committee on Patents, William A. Oldfield, had the decisive vote. He suggested that either Merriam or…