Browse Items (18 total)

Guests commemorating the august publication were given the large menu with their consommé vermicelli and fried breast of chicken. After the fact, in a smaller format, the proceedings were printed, including a list of attendees. At least four of Noah…

With a staff of more than 300 and an investment of $25 million (in today’s money), Webster’s Second was Merriam-Webster’s most ambitious dictionary project to date. The editors benefited from the recently completed OED, the Century, and Funk &…

William Torrey Harris’s successor as chief editor of Merriam’s flagship dictionary was William Allan Neilson, a Scottish poetry expert and Shakespeare scholar who, in 1917, became president of Smith College. In 1924, he accepted an invitation to…

To accompany its big book, Merriam issued this four-page brochure with redline call-outs to illustrate all the elements of its typographically complex pages. One wonders how many dictionary users heeded the admonition to “read this carefully before…

While serving as superintendent of St. Louis schools in 1878, William Torrey Harris reviewed a Merriam-Webster dictionary. By 1900, he had moved to Massachusetts to bring Webster into the 20th century. Harris innovated the “divided page,” which…

The son of Ohio farmers, Isaac Kauffman Funk became a Lutheran pastor and an entrepreneurial religious publisher. With lawyer Adam Wagnalls, he founded the Funk & Wagnalls Company, which produced A Standard Dictionary of the English Language. A staff…