Is the Dictionary Done For?

In the late 1980s, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary sat on the New York Times best-seller list for 155 consecutive weeks and eventually sold 57 million copies, a figure believed to be second only to the Bible in the United States — but those days are thoroughly gone. Stefan Fatsis’s new book “Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary” chronicles what Louis Menand describes in The New Yorker as “a losing struggle” for legacy dictionaries to…