Kory Stamper at Longreads:
When I was hired by Merriam-Webster in 1998, it was ostensibly to revise the Big Book, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. The Third, or W3 as it’s called in the office, was released in 1961 and it made a splash. A dictionary written for the nuclear age, it’s 2,662 pages of six-point type, 10 pounds of knowledge stuffed between two buckram-covered boards, the result of tens of thousands of editorial hours by more than a hundred in-house editors and two hundred outside experts. It’s a nonpareil of twentieth-century American lexicography, notable for its almost scientific, systematic approach to what belongs in a dictionary and how the words inside it should be defined. Every modern American dictionary that you’ve consulted owes something to the Third—even if that something is that the dictionary you’re consulting is not the Third.
I say “ostensibly” because every editor who had been hired at Merriam-Webster since the mid-1970s had been hired to revise the Third, but no work had been undertaken on a full revision of the beast since its publication.
More here.
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