 “People say to me, ‘How do I know if a word is real?’ You know, anybody who’s read a children’s book knows that love makes things real. If you love a word, use it. That makes it real.” In this exuberant TEDTalk, Erin McKean looks at the many ways today’s print dictionary is poised for transformation. Her job as lexicographer involves searching high and low—from books to blogs, newspapers to cocktail parties—for new words, new meanings for old words, or signs that old words have fallen out of use. As the CEO and co-founder of new online dictionary Wordnik, McKean is reshaping not just dictionaries, but how we interact with language itself. She is also the editor of the language quarterly Verbatim and the author of multiple books, including That’s Amore and the entire Weird and Wonderful Words series. Surprisingly, she is notoriously bad at Scrabble.
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