In “Unabridged,” Stefan Fatsis explores what words make the official grade. By Dan Piepenbring Dan Piepenbring is the co-author of “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the ...

Like Plimpton? You’ll mostly like Plimpton 2.0 Wall Street Journal sportswriter and NPR commentator Stefan Fatsis sets out to personally discover the workings of a militaristic, multimillion-dollar ...

“The Definition of a Dictionary,” published in Slate on Tuesday, is Stefan Fatsis’ story about the latest, mammoth, digitally-oriented remake of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Last weekend Stefan ...

Once, every middle-class home had a piano and a dictionary. The purpose of the piano was to be able to listen to music before phonographs were available and affordable. Later on, it was to torture ...

In an era of search engines and algorithm-inspired slang, dictionaries can seem like analog relics. But for writer Stefan Fatsis — who spent time working for America’s oldest dictionary publisher, ...

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 ...

Are dictionaries going the way of dodos, pocket calculators and civil discourse? Some dictionaries are still printed but, increasingly, the reference books have moved online. And, as Stefan Fatsis ...