“A passel of double-domes at the G. & C. Merriam Company joint in Springfield, Mass., have been confabbing and yakking for 27 years — which is not intended to infer that they have not been doing plenty work.” Thus began an editorial that appeared in The New York Times on Oct. 12, 1961, excoriating the recently published Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.

At 2,700 pages and almost 14 pounds, Webster’s Third was a literally weighty work, the product of over 700 editor-years of effort, the publisher boasted. But it was widely denounced for what critics viewed as a lax admissions policy: it opened its columns to parvenus like “litterbug” and “wise up,” declined to condemn “ain’t,” and illustrated its definitions with quotations from down-market sources like Ethel Merman and Betty Grable. That was reason enough for The Times to charge that Merriam had “surrendered to the permissive school” and that the dictionary’s “say as you go” approach would surely accelerate the deterioration already apparent in the language. In The New Yorker, Dwight Macdonald wrote that the editors had “made a sop of the solid structure of English,” and in an Atlantic article called “Sabotage in Springfield,” Wilson Follett called the Third a “fighting document” that was “out to destroy . . . every obstinate vestige of linguistic punctilio, every surviving influence that makes for the upholding of standards.” (The dereliction that most appalled Follett was the Third’s refusal to reject “that darling of the advanced libertarians,” the use of “like” as a conjunction.)

The uproar spilled over beyond the culture pages. In his novel “Gambit,” Rex Stout had his detective Nero Wolfe feed his Third to the fire a page at a time while declaring it “subversive and intolerably offensive.” In a New Yorker cartoon by Alan Dunn, a receptionist at Merriam tells a visitor: “Sorry. Dr. Gove ain’t in.” The reference was to Philip Babcock Gove, editor of the Third. A crusty former Naval Reserve officer from New Hampshire and a political conservative, Gove was an unlikely target for vilifications like “subversive” and “Bolshevik.” But it was his fate to become the only American lexicographer whose name could appear in a New Yorker caption without need of identification.

Gove was naïve to imagine that the dictionary could be purged of all subjective value judgments. Yet the Third wasn’t the radical manifesto critics made it out to be. Mmes. Merman and Grable notwithstanding, its three most frequently cited sources were Shakespeare, the Bible and Milton. And the editors insisted — quaintly, by modern lights — on including only words that had been documented in respectable venues. In a letter responding to the Times editorial, Gove pointed out that “double-dome” had been used by John Mason Brown and Alistair Cooke, and that “finalize” could be found in “highly reputable places” like The New Republic and The Times itself.