Wut’s in a word?

It’s intoxicating to be in the dictionary.

- DAN PIEPENBRING

Sometimes, when I Google myself, I get a cheap thrill from finding my name on Merriam-Webster’s website, where the “Recent Examples on the Web” section displays sentences I have no memory of writing. There I am, illustrating unimpeachable usage of “sweatshop,” or “Antichrist,” or “vainglorious.”

Which is apt: The sample sentences are “automatically compiled from online sources,” and regularly replaced. But it’s as close as I may ever come to being cast in bronze.

With some envy, then, I report that the journalist Stefan Fatsis has written actual definitions for more than a dozen words in the Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, including “alt-right,” “burkini” and “microaggression.”

Fatsis had no prior lexicographic training. He accomplished his feat the old-fashioned way: by cozying up to the right people. To write his engaging new book, Unabridged, he spent years haunting Merriam-Webster’s headquarters in Springfield, Massachusetts.

He'd hoped to chronicle the company’s long-awaited overhaul of its online unabridged dictionary, the first major undertaking since Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged appeared in 1961. Ominously, that revision never coalesced.

Instead, Fatsis’ residency, which began in 2014, overlapped with a period of dramatic retrenchment. As Fatsis combed through its ancient filing cabinets and asked the big questions — How should a dictionary be? Who is it for? — Merriam-Webster was beset by layoffs. The more convinced he became that the dictionary was a vital institution, the more perilous its future appeared.