One of the features of M-W.com that's been around the longest is the Word of the Day. (I recall subscribing to it via my Hotmail account, which sheds some light onto how ancient WotD truly is.) It came into being at some point after the website was born in 1996, during what Sokolowski calls the Internet's Cretaceous Age. "This was the dawn of the way we know it today," he says. WotD now has some 650,000 subscribers.

Since those early days, the site has gotten a redesign and a growing number of fun and interactive items. Additional dictionaries have been created, like WordCentral, a free intermediate-level dictionary, and the new ESL Learner's Dictionary, which uses a simplified vocabulary of 3,000 words to define 100,000 for non-native English speakers. Then there's the massive subscription-only Unabridged Dictionary, which features 475,000 words and is behind a paywall, mostly used by academic institutions and libraries. Overall, the web business is supported by ads, and yes, "Merriam-Webster is a profitable company," says Sokolowski, "the number one language reference brand in print and the number two language reference brand online and for mobile apps."

In fact, he explains, "The Collegiate Dictionary is the best-selling book in U.S. history after the Bible. It's a tradition we're committed to maintain; [print] is by no means dead as a market. There are plenty of people like me who will always buy a book." Dictionary sales may have gone down, but website visits have gone up, and Merriam-Webster is committed to maintaining both sides of the business. Further, the digital side of the business is only expanding—Sokolowski cites 10 million downloads of the M-W.com app. "The dictionary in the most generic scope is being used more than ever," he says. "You can have it as an app; it's online while you're at work; you can have it as a print book. Book sales are down, but we're seeing an overall increase in use." The company is starting to get into the e-book game, as well—their Learner's Dictionary is the first to be produced with a free e-book instead of a CD-rom mated with the print version. That's how they're releasing the Collegiate edition too.

Arguably the most fascinating part of any dictionary, though, are the words themselves, and the stories they tell in reverse of the people and societies in search of their meanings. The Internet means, suddenly, there's a opportunity to keep track of these searches and interpret them. "Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster had had no idea if anyone would read a certain definition, but we know which words are being looked up," says Sokolowski. "It's a way to trace people's thoughts."

So, what are people thinking? Affect and effect are among the most looked-up words on any given day; other frequently searched terms include paradigm, ubiquitous, integrity, conundrum, and pragmatic. "Most of them have classical roots and slightly abstract meanings; they send people to the dictionary," he says. But you can break it down even further: People go to the dictionary for a few different reasons: for usage (as with affect and effect), for spelling (a word like fiancé), or for comprehension or definitions (with love, another frequently looked-up word, "they're not going for the spelling," says Sokolowski). Sometimes it's easy to connect a word spike to a news story, like in the case of Boson, but often it's more abstract, he says, referencing democracy and socialism. In those cases, "it's just about the zeitgeist."