Not long after my arrival, though, everything changed. Pageviews were declining for Merriam-Webster.com, the company’s free, ad-driven revenue engine: Tweaks to Google’s algorithms had punished ...

Your brain processes letters, words, sounds, semantics and grammar at breakneck speed. StudioM1/iStock via Getty Images Plus The days of having a dictionary on your bookshelf are numbered. But that’s ...

In Stefan Fatsis’s capacious, and at times score-settling, personal history of the reference book, he reveals what the dictionary can still tell us about language in modern life A page taken from the ...