Word lovers and curious readers will love “Word by Word.”

Admittedly, I am a word nerd. Just seeing words like obfuscate, mellifluous, twinge, and cleave on a page makes me crazy with joy. I love words’ interesting meanings, multiple possibilities, sounds and rhythms, as I’m sure all writers and most readers do. As a word nut, maybe it’s not surprising that I also love dictionaries and have even been known to read them for fun. Yet at the same time, I’m willing to bet we all take dictionaries for granted. They’re just…there, and we don’t even think about the lexicographers who write and edit them, or about the thousands of painstaking decisions that go into the preparation of each entry. But thanks to Kory Stamper’s brand-new book, “Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries,” I’ve come to see dictionaries and those who create them in a whole new way.

Ms. Stamper is supremely qualified to serve as our tour guide into the terra incognita of dictionary making. She works for Merriam-Webster as a lexicographer, or as she calls herself, using Samuel Johnson’s famous definition, “a harmless drudge.” In a book that is both memoir and a sort of travelogue through the dictionary, she lets us in on what makes a good lexicographer, how they are trained, what they do all day, and explains the arduous process of writing and editing each entry’s components.

Before you say to yourself, “Oh man, this sounds soooo boring,” let me assure you: in Ms. Stamper’s hands, it’s anything but. For openers, she’s really, really funny and irreverent, and actually made me laugh out loud. I admit that parts of the book are very complex, and that the sections on grammar left me dizzy, but she writes so vividly, and in such a down-to-earth style that I couldn’t help but find her, and her book, irresistible. I think what I like best about “Word by Word” is that it is full of surprises and completely changed my perception of what dictionaries do and my beliefs about the usage rules we English teachers drum into the heads of our students.

I felt an immediate kinship with Ms. Stamper because, like me, she grew up loving words, didn’t play well with numbers and spent a good part of her nerdy adolescence hiding in her room, reading obsessively. Turns out, these traits made her perfectly suited to become a lexicographer. What Merriam-Webster looks for in a potential employee surprised me. They want one to have a four-year degree in ANY major, be a native English-speaker, and possess what the author calls “sprachgefuhl” – a feeling for language, or as she explains it, “the odd buzzing in your brain that tells you that ‘planting the lettuce’ and ‘planting misinformation’ are different uses of ‘plant’.” Ms. Stamper adds that lexicographers also must be compulsive readers, people who enjoy working alone, mostly in silence, eight hours a day and who are willing to accept that their work will never be finished.

You’ll find out the reasons for these odd job requirements when you read the first chapter, “HRAFNKELL: On Falling in Love.” By the way, each chapter begins with a similarly designed title – a word (such as harfnkell, irregardless, posh, or bitch) that will become the chapter’s running example), followed by a phrase that identifies the chapter’s main topic. Pretty neat! Ms. Stamper is so inventive that even her “Acknowledgments” page is cleverly arranged as a series of dictionary entries (in alphabetical order, naturally).

One of the many misconceptions I had about dictionaries concerns their purpose. I’d always believed that a dictionary shows us not only the correct spelling and pronunciation of a word, but also what words are acceptable and how they supposed to be used by relatively literate people. In other words, I thought of the dictionary as the captain of the language police force.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! Turns out, a dictionary is a record of language as it is used, not necessarily of how it should be used. “That’s why we don’t just enter the good stuff; we enter the bad and the ugly stuff, too,” Ms. Stamper explains. Now I understand why we find what we think of as not-words, such as “irregardless,” or nasty words like “bitch,” in the dictionary.

I also was amazed to discover that writing or editing even a single entry – just one word – is a terribly time-consuming process. Ms. Stamper knew she had made her bones as a lexicographer when she was allowed to edit the entry for the word “take” for the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary’s 11th edition. Why? Because “take” is a huge entry, having 107 distinct “senses,” or meanings. Since our language keeps evolving, words accumulate new meanings and usages all the time, so to update any entry, lexicographers have to, among other things, find these new usages and compose a definition for each sense in which the word is used. They do this by reading…everything! I’m not exaggerating here. These folks are omnivores: they read books, magazines, ads, take-out menus, concert programs, labels, the Yellow Pages, even the packaging from a set of Odor-Eaters! This craziness results not only in ferreting out new words to include, but also in coming up with citations, which are examples of how every word is used for each of its definitions. No wonder it took Ms. Stamper an entire month to edit the entry for “take!”

For Ms. Stamper and her fellow “harmless drudges,” the English language has a life of its own – a life they have consecrated themselves to describing. But it’s like a child. “We can dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else’s socks. We can tells to clean itself up….But we will never really be the boss of it. And that’s why it flourishes.”

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Jane Honchell