Do we still need the dictionary?

By Dan Eldridge

Case Study: Merriam-Webster's Bilingual Division

Acting on feedback from end-users transformed M-W’s business for the better.

In the early 1990s, Merriam-Webster Inc. was in the very beginning stages of developing a book that would eventually go on to become one of its most profitable. “Merriam-Wesbter’s Spanish-English Dictionary,” as it’s titled, is a fairly plain mass-market paperback that retails for about $10. And yet, as Merriam-Webster President John Morse explains, entering the bilingual dictionary market was not a decision the company entered into lightly. “It is a big, hard job to create a bilingual dictionary from scratch.” he says, “Which is essentially what we were being asked to do.”

Interestingly enough, the directive to create the dictionary didn’t initially come from Merriam-Webster’s upper-management team, or from anyone else in the organization, for that matter. “Quite simply,” Morse says, “we did it—as we’ve done most things in our publishing program—[based on] feedback from the retailers and distributors we work with. But also from the end-users we reach.”

For years, Morse says, Merriam-Webster’s customers had been contacting the company over and over again with different variations on what was essentially the same question: “*Do you have a Spanish-English dictionary?*” And although Merriam-Webster has long been one of the most successful publishers serving the American dictionary market, they had never lost sight of the fact that without those engaged customers, the company probably wouldn’t have achieved its current level of success in the first place.

It took several years of hard work to finally bring that first Spanish-English dictionary to the marketplace; it finally debuted in 1996. “But we were very gratified,” says Morse. “We went from having no product in the category to having the leading product in the category in the course of just a couple of years.”

After having initially attained such a significant win, Morse says, Merriam-Webster has since been emboldened to expand its bilingual catalog even further. And yet, as was the case with that very first Spanish-English dictionary, a number of the new division’s products, including “Merriam-Webster’s Spanish-English Medical Dictionary” and the “Student’s Illustrated Spanish-English Dictionary,” were created as a direct result of feedback Merriam-Webster had collected from the marketplace. Various retailers and distributors, for instance, had long suggested that Spanish-English dictionaries geared toward the medical community were in high demand, as were bilingual dictionaries for children.

But as Morse is quick to point out, the development of a new Merriam-Webster dictionary—regardless of how loudly the marketplace may be clamoring for it—is a process the company never undertakes until it’s confident it can create “a product of real distinction.” In the case of the mass-market “Spanish-English Dictionary,” for instance—Morse says it’s probably now one of Merriam-Webster’s top-five selling titles—the decision was made early on to focus specifically on New World Spanish as opposed to the European dialect, thereby assuring that the book would be more useful to American language learners.

It’s been well over two decades now since the first editors and lexicographers began working on Merriam-Webster’s initial Spanish dictionary. Morse comes across as both proud and grateful as he attempts to explain the importance of the company’s bilingual division today. “It’s significant,” he says, “and it’s growing. Needless to say, we see an opportunity here, and one that [was] appropriate for us to pursue. It’s a very serious part of the business.”

—Dan Eldridge

Scores of our generation's most celebrated authors have famously waxed poetic about the joys of using the original 20-volume "Oxford English Dictionary." David Foster Wallace, for instance, had a well-documented obsession with the OED. Simon Winchester wrote not one, but two nonfiction books about the dictionary's history. Even J.R.R. Tolkien, who briefly worked on the OED (he was assigned to the letter "W"), spoke fondly of his time there.

But the simple fact is this: When I need to know the correct spelling of, say, "onomatopoeia," or "conscientious" or "hierarchy," there's a decent chance I'll be heading straight to Dictionary.com. Or to be a bit more specific: I'll type the word into my web browser and, after tapping my 'Enter' key, I'll almost certainly be taken straight to Dictionary.com. If you've ever used Google to look up a word, you know exactly what I'm talking about. According to Lisa Sullivan-Cross, Dictionary.com's vice president of marketing and general manager of learning, the site services more than 50 million users each month, and its mobile apps have now been downloaded an astonishing 25 million times.

After all, as John Morse, the president and publisher of Merriam-Webster Inc., is fond of saying, people today tend to be "undiscerning" in their use of dictionaries. Casual online word-searchers today, he says, are beholden to "the tyranny of Google."

Dictionary.com, as Morse points out, is indeed a powerful force in the world of professional lexicography. "You know," he says, "I think they were greatly helped by their name, particularly during that period when "dictionary" was one of the most-used terms on the web. ("Can you think of one other industry where this holds true?" asks Sullivan-Cross in response to Morse's comment. "Is shoes.com the No. 1 seller of shoes?")

"The dictionary business," Morse says with a sigh,"has always been really competitive. [Merriam-Webster has] been up against the biggest multinational dictionaries in the world. We're [used] to being in a competitive environment."

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Dan Eldridge Author's page

Dan Eldridge is a journalist and guidebook author based in Philadelphia's historic Old City district, where he and his partner own and operate Kaya Aerial Yoga, the city's only aerial yoga studio. A longtime cultural reporter, Eldridge also writes about small business and entrepreneurship, travel, and the publishing industry. Follow him on Twitter at @YoungPioneers.

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