When the dictionary went online, lexicographers such as Kory Stamper could suddenly gather data not only about the words in the book but about what people actually use it for. Photograph by Tony Luong / NYT / Redux

One morning in 2001, Kory Stamper, a lexicographer for Merriam-Webster, arrived at work and was given a single word: “take.” She set to work hunting down examples of where the verb form of the word had been used in the wild, from American Literary History to Us Weekly to Craigslist, and organizing these citations by part of speech and usage. Normally, editors will work on several words in a batch. But smaller, more common words are used so often and in so many different ways that a single one can be an incredible headache to revise. As Stamper explains in her recent book, “Word by Word: the Secret Life of Dictionaries,” such words “don’t just have semantically oozy uses that require careful definition, but semantically drippy uses as well. ‘Let’s do dinner’ and ‘let’s do laundry’ are identical syntactically but feature very different semantic meanings of ‘do.’ ” Lexicographers know that when they’ve been assigned a notorious small word—“do,” “run,” “about,” “take”––they’ve arrived.

This was the most ambitious and slippery project Stamper had taken on, and, at times, as she parsed the differences between “take first things first” and “take a shit,” she felt herself “slowly unspooling into idiocy.” It took two weeks to organize the verb form alone into a hundred and seven different senses and sub-senses; after a month, “take” was finally ready for the eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. In the world of words, however, spending a month perfecting an entry is nowhere near the extreme. At a conference in 2013, a lexicographer from the Oxford English Dictionary told Stamper that when he revised “run” it took him nine months. Dictionary editors trade word stories the way élite marathoners collect courses. For Emily Brewster, one of Stamper’s colleagues, a career highlight was discovering a previously unrecorded sense for the indefinite article “a”: “used as a function word before a proper noun to distinguish the condition of the referent from a usual, former, or hypothetical condition.” Stamper gives as an example, “With the Angels dispatched in short order, a rested Schilling, a career pitcher 6-1 in the postseason, could start three times if seven games were necessary against the Yankees”: “a rested Schilling” tells us that, in contrast to his current rested state, he is not usually rested, or he had not been rested previously, but now he is. Each lexicographer has stories like this: epiphanies that reflect the evolution of language.

“Word by Word” is both memoir and exposé, an insider’s tour of the inner circles of the mysterious fortress that is Merriam-Webster. Stamper leads us through her own lexicographical bildungsroman, exploring how she fell in love with words and showing us how the dictionary works, and how it interacts with the world that it strives to reflect. Though Stamper takes great pains to paint herself as your garden-variety, genial nerd, she doesn’t fully dispel the reader of the wonderful myth that there are hyperverbal elves who live somewhere within the pages of the dictionary, scribbling at the language whenever we readers aren’t looking. Stamper paints etymologists as alchemists or magicians, mysterious figures who fill their cubicles with gravity-defying Jenga piles of Old German and Frisian dictionaries. Within lexicographical ranks, Stamper told me, there’s a reverence for expert grammarians that approaches the devotional. “It’s esoteric, Kabbalistic knowledge,” she said. “As you move up the layers towards enlightenment, you will learn more about conjunctive adverbs.”

Stamper most vividly captures the dictionary’s broader interaction with society in her discussion of the linguistic and political overlap surrounding the term “marriage.” In 2009, Stamper writes, her in-box suddenly blew up with objections to Merriam-Webster’s definition of “marriage.” A conservative group had recently discovered that the dictionary included, in its definition of that word, a sub-sense of “marriage” accounting for same-sex marriage. Stamper notes in the book that the definition has nothing to do with a Merriam-Webster political agenda and everything to do with the way in which the word was already being used in the world. By 2003, there were far too many citations for “marriage” with the modifiers “gay” or “same-sex” to ignore, and Stamper and her colleagues revised the entry accordingly. She isn’t sure why the brouhaha took six years to manifest, but, as Stephen Colbert joked on “The Colbert Report” at the time, “The most sinister part is, Merriam-Webster made this change in 2003 . . . which means that for the past six years of my marriage, I may have been gay married and not known it.”

“Word by Word” gives a lively portrait of both Stamper and the institution of the dictionary, but it stops at the present. What will the dictionary be in the future? Peter Sokolowski, the editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, told me that he believes the key to the publisher’s continued survival is its online dictionary. In 1996, John Morse, the company’s president at the time, decided to put the Collegiate Dictionary online for free. “A lot of people thought he was crazy,” Sokolowski said. “And it probably saved the company.”

Sokolowski told me that the Internet hasn’t altered the rate at which language evolves—it’s just made this evolution a process that people can watch develop in real time much more clearly than ever before. When van Leeuwenhoek trained his microscope onto a drop of water, he didn’t put the microorganisms there—he made visible what had been present all along. “Our brains aren’t wired to process language any faster now than generations ago, but, boy, can we record it faster,” Sokolowski said. Stamper makes much the same observation in her memoir, pointing out that Web dictionaries are “malleable, ever-changing works that mirror the quicksilver nature of our language.”

Perhaps even more significantly, the Internet has turned the dictionary into a two-way mirror. When the dictionary went online, lexicographers could suddenly gather data not only about the words in the book but about what people actually use it for. The most commonly searched words on the site are medium-hard abstractions: neither one-cent nor ten-dollar words, but the words you think you know yet would be hard-pressed to define succinctly. The most looked-up word of all time is currently “fascism”; “socialism,” “pragmatic,” “holistic,” and “integrity” all make the top ten. (It’s not all medium-hard words: “love,” a word that people most likely aren’t looking up solely to learn its literal meaning, is also an evergreen in the top twenty. People search for oracles everywhere.)

In “Word by Word,” Stamper calls the Internet both “a vast ball of wax” and “a double-edged sword.” Without the physical limitations of print, the online dictionary can hold a broader lexicon as well as longer definitions. Stamper and her colleagues used to strive for concision, but in an online entry they can add notes and labels, explaining, say, the hip-hop origins of one meaning of the adjective “lit,” and illuminating why “it might be weird when an old white dude says, ‘That was lit.’ ” But with that flexibility comes new rules and new sources of urgency. Stamper cautions, “The Internet, keen and fast, is also a knife’s edge publishers have to dance along. Slow down too much and you’ll feel the blade bite into your feet.” As she was finishing her book, Merriam-Webster, like nearly all print publishers, had to conduct a large series of layoffs. “The language is booming,” she writes, “but lexicography is a shrinking industry.”

Recently, Merriam-Webster has doubled down on its Internet presence, establishing itself as a voice of facts among many alternatives. In early 2016, Lauren Naturale was hired as Merriam-Webster’s content and social-media manager. (She recently left to oversee social-media strategy at the New York Civil Liberties Union.) Naturale and her team looked for other aspects of the dictionary to highlight, such as the site’s Trend Watch, a feature that has been in place since 2010, which allows users to track the most commonly searched words throughout the day, week, month, year, and beyond. Merriam-Webster’s users are extremely active in the comment threads at the bottom of each entry, and the site has a healthy YouTube presence, including more than twenty “Ask the Editor” videos; Stamper’s description of the plural of “octopus” has been watched more than half a million times. And the dictionary’s Twitter account has gone viral over the past year, with more than five hundred and eighty thousand followers. In December, 2016, the Washington Post called the company “Twitter’s edgiest dictionary.” In January, Vox.com used the superlative “sassiest” for Merriam-Webster, after the publisher’s tweet about the definition of the trending topic “fact”—a response to Kellyanne Conway’s infamous description of White House press statements as “alternative facts”—was retweeted more than forty-seven thousand times. Both Merriam-Webster’s online presence and the Webby Awards, which honor excellence on the Internet, launched in 1996, but this is the first year that Merriam-Webster has been nominated for a Webby: “Merriam-Webster Redefines Twitter,” the citation reads.

We still need to understand the nuances of language, even—perhaps especially—on the Internet, when text surrounds us constantly. Merriam-Webster has decided that the way forward is to embrace the classic mission of the dictionary: to present neither opinions nor morals but facts. The publisher’s online presence, and the information that its lexicographers choose to emphasize or examine more closely, are not a judgment about the way we should be speaking but an analysis of the way we are. Sokolowski stressed to me that dictionaries are in the business of recording how people are using the language, not predicting or prescribing any sort of ideological mission. “We’re good at reading data but not good at reading minds,” he told me. “If ‘fascism’ and ‘demagogue’ are spiking—that data does not amount to diagnosis. All it means is that people are interested in the damn word.”