The 72-word door

For the home viewers watching the competition unfold on ESPN, the words Roy had to spell might have been unfamiliar, but the language of the definitions probably rang a bell. If you’ve ever spent much time consulting a modern unabridged dictionary, you might have noticed the peculiar phrasings and tone of its definitions — each one winding its way from a general opening through a litany of complex details in a single, sometimes unmanageable, phrase. And you might have wondered: If dictionaries are intended to illuminate, why can the definitions sound so convoluted?

This style, it turns out, has an origin: Webster’s Third New International Dictionary Unabridged, known as “W3” to its friends. First published in 1961 by Merriam-Webster of Springfield, Mass., the 2,800-page behemoth has become the model for our idea of dictionary-ese, for better or for worse.

Recently in Montreal, at the biennial conference of the Dictionary Society of North America, lexicographers commemorated the 50th anniversary of W3, complete with two dictionary-shaped cakes for the occasion. And the Scripps Bee itself is an annual celebration of W3, since as the competition’s official dictionary it is the source of all of the words, pronunciations, and definitions.

At the time of its publication, however, W3 was excoriated more than it was praised. Editorialists at The New York Times and elsewhere took the dictionary’s editor Philip Gove to task for what they saw as its overly permissive attitude toward nonstandard items like ain’t and irregardless. The usage expert Wilson Follett went so far as to call the release of W3 “a very great calamity” for the English language in an overwrought attack in The Atlantic entitled “Sabotage in Springfield.”

From today’s perspective, the most noteworthy move by Gove and his staff was not the inclusion of contentious words like ain’t. (Critics often failed to notice that the second edition of the dictionary, published in 1934, had already made room for ain’t.) Rather, it was the way it phrased its definitions.