Is the Dictionary Done For?

"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 young persons by insisting that they learn to do something few people do well. The purpose of the dictionary was to settle intra-family disputes over the spelling of words like "camaraderie" and "sesquipedalian," or over the correct pronunciation of "puttee." (Dad wasn't always right!)"

"This was the state of the world not that long ago. In the late nineteen-eighties, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary was on the Times best-seller list for a hundred and fifty-five consecutive weeks. Fifty-seven million copies were sold, a number believed to be second only, in this country, to sales of the Bible. (The No. 1 print dictionary in the world is the Chinese-language Xinhua Dictionary; more than five hundred million copies have sold since it was introduced, in 1953.)"

"There was good money in the word business. Then came the internet and, with it, ready-to-hand answers to all questions lexical. If you are writing on a computer, it's almost impossible to misspell a word anymore. It's hard even to misplace a comma, although students do manage it. And, if you run across an unfamiliar word, you can type it into your browser and get a list of websites with information about it, often way more than you want or need."

Every middle-class home once commonly contained a piano and a dictionary. The piano allowed listening to music before affordable phonographs and later enforced musical training; the dictionary resolved family disputes over spelling and pronunciation and aided homework and word games. In the late 1980s Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary spent 155 consecutive weeks on the Times bestseller list and sold fifty-seven million copies, second only in the United States to the Bible. The Chinese Xinhua Dictionary has sold over five hundred million copies since 1953. The internet introduced instant, plentiful lexical answers, spellcheckers, and search results that diminished the demand for print dictionaries. Legacy dictionaries have had to adapt to survive.

Read at The New Yorker