Merriam-Webster's presence on social media is an outgrowth of a decision made 20 years ago to establish an online presence.
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SPRINGFIELD -- Merriam-Webster, the Springfield-based dictionary company, has been around for nearly 200 years and in that time has been lauded in all sorts of ways.
Here's a new one: social media darling.
The dictionary, formed Springfield in 1828, has had an online presence since 1996, when the decision was made to put the entire contents of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Edition -- it's best seller -- on its website for free. Over time website traffic has grown to the point where it garners 100 million page views a month.
But it is in the last year or so that Merriam-Webster has gained a devoted following on social media -- Twitter and Facebook -- for its sometimes cheeky, always knowledgeable responses to the ways celebrities, public figures and politicians use and abuse the English language. The official Merriam-Webster twitter feed, @MerriamWebster, has 297,000 followers, an increase from around 80,000 a year ago.
Lauren Naturale, the social media manager for Merriam-Webster who handles the company's Twitter account from its New York office, said people seem to appreciate its presence on social media as a definitive source of information.
"The response has been overwhelmingly positive," she said.
Editor-at-Large Peter Sokolowski said the response is perhaps new to the dictionary, but in a sense what they are doing is not really new at all.
"We've always done what we're doing," he said. "We've just changed some of the forms."
Through one of those forms, Twitter, the dictionary is able to respond almost immediately when people raise questions about word usage or grammar from a public figure.
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In one example, shortly after Hillary Clinton famously said on the campaign trail that half of now-President Donald Trump's supporters belonged in a "basket of deplorables," Merriam-Webster tweeted out that she was using the word incorrectly. Deplorable is an adjective, and simply adding an 's' to the end of it does not make it a noun.
In another example, when Trump in one of the debates appeared to use the word "bigly," the dictionary was quick to tweet out that it is indeed a word, albeit an archaic one meaning "haughtily" or "pompously."
More recently, a short time after Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway in a TV interview spoke of "alternative facts," Merriam-Webster tweeted a response that "a fact is a piece of information that is presented as having objective reality."
This social media strategy has not gone unnoticed by the media, including NBC News, The Washington Post and USA Today.
The internet-based publication Vox published a piece recently calling Merriam-Webster the "sassiest Twitter account of the Trump era."
National Public Radio did a segment that suggested the dictionary has for months been "trolling" the Trump administration. Trolling is a term for intentionally antagonizing someone, particularly over the internet, in hopes of provoking a response.
Sokolowski said the dictionary is not trolling anyone. It is merely following its original mission of being an independent and objective arbiter of English grammar and usage.
"We never comment on policy or politics. We're commenting on vocabulary," he said.
Social media values both wit and speed, and Merriam-Webster tries to employ both, he said. "But we've stuck with our topic, which is language. We're not adopting any political stance."
The company's social media presence is built upon the decision made 20 years ago for Merriam-Webster to enter the digital age by placing the contents of the dictionary online, he said. In 1996, there were no business models for such a thing, but he said the feeling was at the time that the move was needed for Merriam-Webster to stay relevant.
"Our feeling was if we didn't put up the full dictionary with all the etymologies and all the words, someone else would," Sokolowski said.
Almost immediately after creating a web portal, Merriam-Webster for the first time had information about how people were using the dictionary, what words they were looking up and when. It didn't take long to notice that the lookups of certain words began spiking at the times of important news events.
This was first noticed in 1997 when Princess Diana died in a Paris car crash as her driver tried to outrun pursuing photographers. Within hours, lookups for the word "paparazzi" grew exponentially.
The same pattern continued through subsequent major news events, like the impeachment hearings of Bill Clinton, the 9/11 terror attacks, and more recently through the presidential election. Sokolowski said people would hear a word on the news or read it in a newspaper, wonder what it means and look around for an answer. Many of those people would find their way to Merriam-Webster.com
Since 2010, Merriam-Webster has been posting its trending words on its website. For over a year, trending words have tended to have some political connection.
"Whatever the culture is interested in all at once, that's what we see online," he said. "And that's been all political in the last few months."
Searches for "fascism" have been popular over the past year, joining "socialism," which has been a commonly searched word since midway through the Obama presidency.
More recently, the most popular lookups according to the dictionary's homepage were "calamity, "betray" and "Svengali," and each ties in with news stories from the past week.
Trending words are linked to short articles prepared by Merriam-Webster writers that explain why the word is trending and then briefly discuss the origin of the word based on the dictionary's files.
Sokolowski said the biggest change in Merriam-Webster's Twitter presence over the past year has been hiring Naturale to operate it. He said she has a knack for communicating over the internet in a limited format like Twitter, and under her, @MerriamWebster has become much more lively, engaging, informative and fun.
"If that means we can be presented as less stuffy, great," he said.
Naturale said there is nothing new or novel about Merriam-Webster demonstrating its sass.
"Dictionaries have been sassy since the 18th century," she said, "so we're very comfortable with that."
Sokoloski makes the same point, and as he is wont to do, backed it up with some evidence.
Reaching into a floor-to-ceiling bookcase of dictionaries, he pulled out a copy of "A Dictionary of the English Language," which was published by Samuel Johnson in 1775. Johnson is remembered today as a poet, essayist, biographer and literary critic. In his day he also was somewhat of a sassy lexicographer, Sokolowski said.
To demonstrate his point, he flips the pages and stops on "oats," which is defined as "a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people."
Flipping next to the word "lexicographer," Sokolowski reads the definition: "A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge."
Sokolowski said that, ultimately, Merriam-Webster's foray into social media gives it an opportunity to showcase what a former editor used to call the "Merriam voice."
The Merriam voice is not some smart alecky know-it-all, he said, but representative of someone who values language, has a knowledge of it, and a confidence that comes from spending a career working with it.
"That voice translates pretty well to the internet," he said.
"A social media presence should have personalities. Dictionaries have a lot of personality," he said.
