Merriam-Webster is revising its most authoritative tome for the digital age

By the high-gloss, high-tech standards of 21st-century corporate life, the headquarters of America’s premier dictionary publisher is an unusual place. Merriam-Webster Inc. is housed in a two-story brick building in Springfield, Massachusetts, that, if not for the bas-relief dictionary and company name above the front door, could pass for an old elementary school. There’s a broad central staircase, and dowdy conference rooms, linoleum floors, and creaky wooden doors, even some hospital-green and cafeteria-yellow walls. The decor is a mishmash of stately oak desks from the 1940s and gray cubicles from the 1990s.

On the first floor are business offices and company artifacts. A glass case down an echoey hallway contains Noah Webster’s first lexicographic effort, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1806, and his 1828 follow-up, An American Dictionary of the English Language, which, with 70,000 entries, rivaled Samuel Johnson’s great British book. The second floor is home to about 40 definers, etymologists, pronouncers, daters, and typists, plus the most comprehensive extant repository of the history of American English: 16 million 3-by-5-inch slips of paper, known as citations, crammed into alphabetized drawers in rows of chest-high, metal filing cabinets. “The essential value of the company is inside those drawers,” says Peter Sokolowski, a Merriam editor. “It’s irreplaceable.” The citation files are supposed to be fireproof. But with no sprinkler system installed—an accidental soaking would cause serious damage—no one wants to find out if they really are.