Overview

• The new edition arrives Nov. 18 with preorders open, marking the first hard‑copy overhaul since 2003 and weighing nearly five pounds.
• Additions reflect tech and internet-era language, including rizz, dad bod, dumbphone, ghost kitchen, WFH, doomscroll, petrichor and teraflop.
• Editors added more than 20,000 usage examples, enhanced entries for top lookups and curated word lists, with all new words already live on Merriam-Webster.com.
• To create space, Merriam-Webster cut sparse biographical and geographical sections and dropped some archaic terms such as enwheel.
• The update comes as U.S. dictionary sales decline, with a 9% drop in the past year, even as the company sells about 1.5 million dictionaries annually and reports roughly a billion website visits a year and strong digital revenue growth.