A short history of the 1913 dictionary on our word pages

Open one of our word pages and, under the word, you'll often find a definition written in 1913. The book it comes from is Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, published by the G. & C. Merriam Company in Springfield, Massachusetts, edited in its final form under Noah Porter, and it's a physical giant: over two thousand pages, heavy enough to need a stand. Its definition of "computer" is the quickest way to feel the distance between its world and ours. A computer, says 1913, is one who computes. A person. A reckoner, sitting at a desk with columns of figures, doing by hand and brain the work that a machine on your wrist now does in a blink. The book isn't wrong. It's early. That's the charm of it, and also the warning label.

Why is a dictionary from before the First World War defining words on a modern word-game site? Two reasons, and they're both practical. The first is legal and short: the book is in the public domain. Its copyright is long expired, so Pangramist can print its definitions word for word without owing anyone, and you'll find the full credit on our credits page. Modern dictionaries are businesses. Their definitions are written work, owned, and taking them would be stealing dressed as research. The second reason is better. The 1913 book is a wonderful dictionary, one of the last great one-volume attempts to hold the whole language between two covers, and for word games it's oddly well suited, because word lists are conservative too. The words games care about skew old.

How to read a 1913 definition

The old book writes in a voice you'll recognise within two entries. Definitions run long and stack their senses in order, most common first. Etymologies come in brackets, marching the word back through French and Latin and Greek with complete confidence. Pronunciations use a system of marked letters that no living reader fully commands, and we keep them out of the way on our pages rather than pretend otherwise.

Spellings date it constantly. You'll meet hyphens where nobody puts them now, words written as two that have since married into one, and the occasional term spelled in a way that looks like a misprint and isn't. We leave the spellings as the book has them inside quotations, because tidying them up would quietly turn a 1913 text into a modern one while keeping its authority. Where a spelling would confuse a player checking a word, the word page's own material, written by us, uses the modern form.

The definitions that date badly

Not everything in the old book has aged like the computer entry, quaint and harmless. A dictionary that tries to hold a whole culture holds its blind spots too. Some entries use terms for peoples and places that no editor would print now. Some describe trades, customs, and beliefs in the flat tone of an empire that assumed its readers shared its view of the world. A few are simply, confidently wrong, as any book that size is bound to be in places.

Our policy is to keep those definitions as they stand, with their date attached and visible, rather than quietly edit them into respectability. A definition on this site that says "Webster's, 1913" is a historical document, offered as one. Editing it without a trace would falsify the record and, worse, would hide exactly the thing a curious reader can learn from it: that reference books are written by people, in a time, with that time's limits. Readers who'd rather not meet the period flavour can stick to the short explanations we write ourselves, which sit alongside and are marked as ours.

What happened when our list met the book

Building this site meant matching two old artefacts: ENABLE, our word list, and the 1913 text. The match, described in the page plan, normalised both sides to plain lowercase headwords and paired what it could. Three kinds of leftovers turned up, and we dealt with each out in the open.

Words in the list with no 1913 entry ship without a period definition, and their pages say so rather than filling the space with borrowed modern text. ZYZZYVA, the weevil from guide 18, is one: real, listed, and simply too new for a book printed before its genus was named. Entries in the 1913 book with no match in the list, the deeply archaic words the language has let go, don't become word pages at all in our first year. They'd be pages nobody plays and nobody searches for. And the spelling variants, where the book and the list spell the same word two ways, follow the list's spelling, since the list is what decides playability here, with the book's form noted where it's interesting.

Start with the computer

If you read one old definition after this guide, make it the one this page opened with. Find the word page for "computer" in the launch set and read what 1913 thought the word meant, a person at a desk, reckoning. Then look at the device you're reading on. The whole strange, useful, dated world of the book sits inside that one entry, and it's the same book standing behind every definition on this site, dated, credited, and kept honest.