Lora Kelley at The Nation:
In 2014, at a small Stanford University lecture hall, the Merriam-Webster editor Peter Sokolowski introduced the crowd of assembled nerds to the idea that a dictionary is not a static document but a living object, constantly updated and remade in response to how people write and speak. In a talk titled “The Dictionary as Data,” Sokolowski emphasized that the editors at Merriam-Webster look to how the general public uses language to guide their work. He shared enticing tidbits, including that xi and za, classic Scrabble words, were popular late-night searches in the online dictionary, and that people regularly look up love ahead of Valentine’s Day. Awed, I wrote in a campus magazine a few days later that “we forget that the dictionary, a seeming bastion of objective reality, is compiled by people who use language, too.”
I had not, until that evening, thought much about how the dictionary came to be the way it is. I had always seen it as one of those things that was just kind of there, like a textbook or a museum wall text or the other ambient bits of language that seemed to arrive in front of me for my education and consumption.
more here.
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