put a check in the margin next to the marked word so the typists don’t go blind trying to find your faint, chicken-scratch underlining in all that text.

When dealing with entries of this size, you will inevitably hit the Wall. If you run, or have tried to run, then you are familiar with the Wall. It’s the point in a run when you are pushed (or pushing) beyond your physical endurance. Your focus pulls inward on your searing lungs, your aching calves, that hitch in your right hip that is probably

no fallacist suggests that we need to reorder the months of the year because the names for a bunch of them—September through December—don’t match up etymologically with their placement in the calendar. September (seven) is the ninth month of the year; October (eight), the tenth; November (nine), the eleventh; and December (ten), the twelfth.

One of the most common requests we have gotten over the years is for more example sentences in our dictionaries.

They believe that if we make a change to the dictionary, then we have made a change to the language, and if we make a change to the language, then we also make a change to the culture around that language.

language that doesn’t change is a dead language,

Lexicographers can grow inured to slurs while defining them—how many times can you read the word “bitch” before it stops even looking like an English word?—but

Why do we call them “sideburns”? It’s a play on the name of the Civil War officer who made them popular, General Burnside.

Standard English as it is presented by grammarians and pedants is a dialect that is based on a mostly fictional, static, and Platonic ideal of usage.