Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary

"In the United States it is considered, among publishing companies, to be the dictionary of record. What I mean by that is that if you go into the offices of a publishing company, you are not going to see various dictionaries on people’s bookshelves as you take a tour. Everybody is just going to have Merriam-Webster’s. I chose it because I felt there needs to be a dictionary on this list of five books because dictionaries are fundamental. A lot of people criticise Merriam-Webster’s because it is not necessarily clear – just because a word is in the dictionary, it doesn’t mean you should use it. For example, Merriam-Webster’s includes the word ‘irregardless.’ You might come back to me and say: ‘Irregardless is not a word. It is a duplicative of regardless. It is a ridiculous word.’ But I will respond, ‘Yes, it is a word. I just used it.’ It doesn’t mean that it is a good word, but it exists. There are a lot of things in this world that we wish didn’t exist but they do, and ‘irregardless’ is one of them. What people should realise—and this is a point a lot of editors and writers don’t realise, as well as laypeople—is that dictionaries are descriptive and not prescriptive. They describe the way things are, not the way things should be. A dictionary includes every word that is used including our ‘hella.’ It is not saying you should use this word. It is saying this word exists, and if you are going to use it, this is how it is spelled and this is what it means and this is how it is pronounced. I’m not sure if everybody would agree that Merriam-Webster’s does a better job of that than any other dictionary, but it happens to be my preference just because it is the dominant resource among publishing companies, who have traditionally been the arbiters of the best of language and written communication. No, I think it’s just a marketing term. It’s like, ‘Hey kids, this is what you should buy if you want to pass your midterms.’ I think it was distinguished from the general Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary because it was more compact; it didn’t have as many words in it as the general edition. It was marketed as a smaller, cheaper alternative for college students. But it superseded the previous version of the dictionary, and is now the prevalent version. They do, but it’s insignificant. Except if you are supposed to spell something the same way every time, which is, you know, the idea. One of them might close a two-word compound, the other might hyphenate it. For example, the word ‘mindset’ has traditionally been hyphenated, but a lot of people are treating it as closed now, so you’ll find it that way in some dictionaries because dictionaries, as I said, are descriptive. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The interesting thing is, why do dictionaries contradict each other? One dictionary says it’s ‘mind-set’ with a hyphen, and another one says it’s closed. They are both citing sources; they’ll cite a book or a magazine or some other printed content or even a website that that spelling appeared in, and say, ‘Look at all these resources — they’re saying you don’t hyphenate ‘mindset’ any more.’ Another dictionary will say ‘Yes, you hyphenate “mind-set,” and look at all this evidence that we have accumulated.’ Again, they are both right because the word is in transition and you’ll see it treated both ways. They’ve just made different decisions about what the prevailing form is for a word. If your publication uses Merriam-Webster’s to resolve any issues of spelling or style, then you’re going to do what Merriam-Webster’s says. And if somebody says, ‘Our dictionary of record is Random House ’ and Random House closes ‘mindset,’ you’re going to do it that way. There’s also the house style. A lot of publications have their own resource. They might want to generally follow a resource like Merriam-Webster’s or the Chicago Manual of Style or the Oxford Style Guide, but they will say, ‘Except in this case, when we are going to do it this way instead.’ So they’ll have a separate guide, which is a separate document that will say, ‘These are the exceptions to the dictionary or the style guide that we want you to use.’"