My twin brother works as the Director of Design at Crossway, the company that produces the most popular translation of the Bible. I sent him this email:
People at Crossway might enjoy this since you produce giant thick books. Merriam-Webster is releasing its first print dictionary in over 20 years. The social media director was interviewed by Mozilla. He said:
they made it really pretty, and it feels like a really cool book that you would display. I’m very excited because I’m doing deep dives of old ads for an almost 200-year-old company.
Here are some clippings from their PR page about the print edition:
Complete with thumb notches and a deep red cover, weighing almost five pounds, the Twelfth Edition will be released on November 18, 2025. It’s available now for pre-order.
Thoroughly updated and redesigned for students, professionals, and word lovers, the Twelfth Edition features over 5,000 new words (including cold brew, farm-to-table, rizz, and dad bod), 1,000 new phrases and idioms, enhanced entries for the top lookups, and more than 20,000 additional usage examples.
The new Collegiate also introduces curated word lists (e.g., “Words From the 1990s” and “Words for Things That Often Go Unnamed”), expanded usage guidance, and fascinating word histories (e.g., calculate comes from the Latin for “pebble,” because Romans used little stones for addition and subtraction). And readers will still find the classic line drawings—from a friendly looking aardvark to a prickly zoea (“a free swimming planktonic larval form of many decapod crustaceans”).
I dunno. I just get a kick of thinking how the dictionary and the Bible are both big thick books.
Amazon has a sneak peek preview of one of the pages:
I almost want to buy one. But I know that my local library will likely have a copy. It’ll be fun to browse through it. Although…. I wonder if it might be nice to have one at home for my daughters to use.