《大西洋月刊》谈美国英语词典的末日

klwo2

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上上个月（September 13, 2025）《大西洋月刊》发的文章，我平时忙得很，没工夫看这家，所以消息难免滞后了，不过应该还有人没看过，所以全文搬过来吧

3 |; h5 [" n$ m8 b中文是GLM-4 Flash 机翻的，译文有毛病的地方不少，不过反正本坛的朋友都看得懂英文，我就懒得改了，不爱给AI挑错
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Is This the End of the Dictionary?
6 ?# ^2 g* c$ x# L" j5 V+ u: j这是字典的末日吗？
) d/ d9 Y2 ^% q# Z9 s5 @3 @Obsolete (adj.): no longer in use or no longer useful

+ F. S) \% s6 N! FBy Stefan Fatsis
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. ~2 t* N6 {  R( f- @0 n- VIn 2015, I settled in at the Springfield, Massachusetts, headquarters of Merriam-Webster, America’s most storied dictionary company. My project was to document the ambitious reinvention of a classic, and I hoped to get some definitions of my own into the lexicon along the way. (A favorite early drafting effort, which I couldn’t believe wasn’t already included, was dogpile : “a celebration in which participants dive on top of each other immediately after a victory.”) Merriam-Webster’s overhaul of its signature work, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged—a 465,000-word, 2,700-page, 13.5-pound doorstop published in 1961 and never before updated—was already in full swing. The revision, which would be not a hardback book but an online-only edition, requiring a subscription, was expected to take decades.
4 m! K6 b& v% ?$ `$ w( m( k1 Q% V2015 年，我定居在马萨诸塞州斯普林菲尔德的梅里亚姆-韦伯斯特公司总部，这是美国最负盛名的词典公司。我的项目是记录一部经典的雄心勃勃的革新，并希望在这个过程中将自己的定义纳入词汇库。（我最喜欢的一个早期草稿工作，让我不敢相信还没有被收录，是 dogpile：“在胜利后，参与者立即跳到彼此身上进行庆祝的行为。”）梅里亚姆-韦伯斯特对其标志性作品《韦伯斯特第三版新国际词典，未删节版》的翻新——这本 1961 年出版、45.5 万字、2700 页、重 13.5 磅的大块头词典，此前从未更新——已经全面展开。这次修订将不会是一本精装书，而是一本仅在线发布的版本，需要订阅，预计将耗时数十年。

) d' \, L7 O7 ^' g+ BNot long after my arrival, though, everything changed. Pageviews were declining for Merriam-Webster.com, the company’s free, ad-driven revenue engine: Tweaks to Google’s algorithms had punished Merriam’s search results. The company had always been lean and profitable, but the financial hit was real. Merriam’s parent, Encyclopedia Britannica, was facing challenges of its own—who needed an encyclopedia in a Wikipedia world?—and ordered cuts. Merriam laid off more than a dozen staffers. Its longtime publisher, John Morse, was forced into early retirement. The revision of Merriam’s unabridged masterpiece was abandoned.
然而，在我到任不久后，一切发生了变化。Merriam-Webster.com的页面浏览量开始下降，这是公司免费、依靠广告盈利的收入引擎：谷歌算法的调整惩罚了梅里亚姆的搜索结果。公司一直精简且盈利，但这次财务打击是实实在在的。梅里亚姆的母公司大英百科全书也面临着自身的挑战——在一个喂鸡百科的世界里，谁还需要百科全书呢？——并下令削减开支。梅里亚姆裁员超过十几名员工。其长期担任的出版人约翰·莫斯被迫提前退休。梅里亚姆未删节的鸿篇巨著的修订工作被放弃。

Call it the paradox of the modern dictionary. We’re in a golden age for the study and appreciation of words—a time of “meta awareness” of language, as one lexicographer put it to me. Dictionaries are more accessible than ever, available on your laptop or phone. More people use them than ever, and dictionary publishers now possess the digital wherewithal to closely track that use. Podcasts, newsletters, and Words of the Year have popularized neologisms, etymologies, and usage trends. Meanwhile, analytical software has revolutionized linguistic inquiry, enabling greater understanding of the ways language works—when, how, and why words break out; the specific contexts for expressions and idioms. And all of that was true long before the rise of AI.
称之为现代词典的悖论吧。我们正处在研究和欣赏词汇的黄金时代——正如一位词典编纂家对我所说的那样，这是一个“元意识”的语言时代。词典比以往任何时候都更容易获取，可以在你的笔记本电脑或手机上使用。越来越多的人使用它们，而词典出版商现在拥有数字能力来密切跟踪这种使用情况。播客、通讯和年度词汇推广了新词、词源和用法趋势。与此同时，分析软件彻底改变了语言研究，使我们能够更深入地理解语言运作的方式——何时、如何以及为什么词语会流行；表达和习语的具体语境。而所有这一切在人工智能兴起之前就已经存在了。
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2 ]- W' O" e0 p/ L9 V% w- X" kBut these advances are also strangling the business of the dictionary. Definitions, professional and amateur, are a click away, and most people don’t care or can’t tell whether what pops up in a search is expert research, crowdsourced jottings, scraped data, or zombie websites. Before he left Merriam, Morse told me that legacy dictionaries face the same growing popular distrust of traditional authorities that media and government have encountered.
+ ^* s9 \' m. V* A7 K' ?但这些进步也扼杀了词典的业务。定义，无论是专业的还是业余的，只需轻轻一点即可获取，而大多数人不在乎，或者无法分辨搜索结果中弹出的是专家研究、众包笔记、抓取数据还是僵尸网站。在离开梅里亚姆之前，莫尔斯告诉我，传统词典面临着与传统权威日益增长的公众不信任，就像媒体和政府所遭遇的那样。
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Other big names in American lexicography were already receding. In 2001, a decade after releasing an edition dubbed the “politically correct dictionary” for its inclusion of womyn, herstory, waitron, and more, Random House abandoned dictionary making altogether. Webster’s New World Dictionary cycled through corporate owners until its last edition, in 2014. The American Heritage Dictionary, published in 1969 to challenge Merriam’s Third, is an infrequently updated shell of its legendary self.
) S3 O% d3 R$ @1 S, W* Q' }美国词典学界的其他巨头早已逐渐淡出。2001 年，在推出被誉为“政治正确词典”的版本（因其包含 womyn、herstory、waitron 等内容）十年后，兰登书屋完全放弃了词典编纂业务。韦氏新世界词典经历了多次公司所有权的更迭，直到 2014 年其最后一版问世。1969 年出版的《美国传统词典》，旨在挑战梅里亚姆第三版，如今已成为一个更新不频繁的传奇空壳。

By the start of this decade, the once-competitive American dictionary business was essentially down to two players: Merriam-Webster, with its 200 years of tradition and brand recognition, and Dictionary.com, whose founders, 30 years ago, beat Merriam to the URL by a few weeks. After it was acquired in 2008 by the media and internet giant IAC, Dictionary.com’s small editorial staff had innovated. When I visited its offices in 2016, the company’s verticals for slang, emoji, memes, and terms related to gender and sexuality were robust, and its periodic dictionary updates were trendy and substantial—a batch of entries included superfood and clicktivism. The company reportedly had more than 5 billion annual searches in the mid-2010s, and in 2018 was among the internet’s 500 most-visited websites.
到本世纪初期，曾经竞争激烈的美国词典业务基本上只剩下两家公司：拥有 200 年传统和品牌知名度的梅里亚姆-韦伯斯特，以及 30 年前其创始人比梅里亚姆早几周抢到 URL 的 Dictionary.com。在 2008 年被媒体和互联网巨头 IAC 收购后，Dictionary.com 的小型编辑团队进行了创新。当我在 2016 年参观其办公室时，该公司在俚语、表情符号、迷因以及与性别和性相关术语的垂直领域非常强大，其定期的词典更新既时尚又实质性强——其中一批词条包括超级食物和点击行动主义。据报道，该公司在 2010 年代中期每年有超过 50 亿次搜索，到 2018 年已成为互联网访问量前 500 的网站之一。

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! z2 H6 ~& T% e) b; }9 t  FIn 2018, Dictionary.com was purchased by the mortgage-industry titan (and Cleveland Cavaliers owner) Dan Gilbert’s company Rock Holdings—apparently just because Gilbert was a fan of dictionaries. He took a personal interest in the project, and for a few years, it seemed like the digital future of the lexicon was at hand. The line inside the company was that Gilbert wanted “to own the English language.” And he did seem genuinely interested in the work of the dictionary. “Every so often he would ask a question that a reader might ask,” John Kelly, a longtime Dictionary.com editor, told me. For instance, Gilbert was into extreme weather, Kelly said, and had subordinates brief him on terms such as bombogenesis. When Rock Holdings’ mortgage and financial companies went public in 2020, Dictionary.com remained privately held, shielding the site from shareholder pressures.
2018 年，词典.com 被抵押贷款行业巨头（也是克利夫兰骑士队老板）丹·吉尔伯特的公司 Rock Holdings 收购——显然只是因为吉尔伯特喜欢词典。他对这个项目非常关注，有那么几年，数字化的词汇未来似乎就要到来。公司内部的说法是，吉尔伯特想要“拥有英语”。而且他确实对词典的工作很感兴趣。“他时不时问一些读者可能会问的问题，” Dictionary.com 的资深编辑约翰·凯利告诉我。例如，凯利说，吉尔伯特对极端天气很感兴趣，他的下属会向他介绍诸如 bombogenesis 之类的术语。当 Rock Holdings 的抵押贷款和金融公司于 2020 年上市时，词典.com 仍然保持私有，从而免受股东压力。
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Read: The philosophy behind the first American dictionary
( e- \. W4 t, ~) {& ^阅读：美国第一部词典背后的哲学
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In 2023, Dictionary.com hired three full-time veteran lexicographers—including Grant Barrett, a co-host of the public-radio show A Way With Words, and Kory Stamper, a former longtime Merriam-Webster editor and the author of the memoir Word by Word—to bolster a team of about a dozen freelancers. The goal was to modernize the dictionary, which was a gigantic undertaking. Dictionary.com was based primarily on The Random House Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (published in 1966, updated in 1987), which was based on The New Century Dictionary (published in 1927), which was based on The Century Dictionary (published in 1889), which was based on The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language (published in 1847). Some of the entries were more than 100 years old.
& x  o. q7 ^" L" a7 v2023 年，Dictionary.com 聘请了三位全职资深词典学家——包括公共广播节目《A Way With Words》的联合主持人格兰特·巴雷特（Grant Barrett），以及前长期担任《Merriam-Webster》编辑、著有回忆录《Word by Word》的科里·斯塔姆珀（Kory Stamper）——以增强由约十二名自由职业者组成的团队。目标是对词典进行现代化改造，这是一项庞大的工程。Dictionary.com 主要基于《兰登书屋不列颠英语词典》（1966 年出版，1987 年更新），该词典基于《新世纪词典》（1927 年出版），后者又基于《世纪词典》（1889 年出版），再往后基于《英语帝国词典》（1847 年出版）。其中部分词条已有超过 100 年的历史。

/ D0 O' F: e# \  FThe lexicography team revised frequently viewed terms such as theory and hypothesis, which generate lots of traffic at the start of the school year. It enhanced entries with new pronunciations, etymologies, and alternative senses, such as a new adjectival use of mid (“mediocre, unimpressive, or disappointing”). It removed sexist and archaic language and diversified names in example sentences. (“ ‘John went to school,’ ” Barrett told me. “Why not Juan or Juanita or Giannis? This is a multicultural society.”)
) w& `4 ]6 S7 ]$ Z# H- }编纂团队频繁修订诸如理论和假设等受关注词汇，这些词汇在开学初会带来大量流量。团队增强了词条的新发音、词源和替代含义，例如 mid 作为形容词的新用法（“平庸的、不令人印象深刻的或令人失望的”）。团队删除了性别歧视和过时的语言，并多样化了例句中的姓名。（“‘约翰去上学了，’巴雷特告诉我。‘为什么不能是胡安或胡安娜或扬尼斯？这是一个多元文化社会。”）

& F& e2 L; e9 }& `Barrett designed a reading program to help flag emerging lexical items and turbocharge additions, tripling the volume of new words added in the site’s periodic updates over the course of a year. A February 2024 rollout included Barbiecore, bed rotting, slow fashion, range anxiety, and enshittification, which the American Dialect Society had chosen a month earlier as its 2023 Word of the Year. (Of those words, only enshittification has since been added by Merriam, and only to a new slang portal, not the official dictionary.) The lexicography team was revising a database to more quickly update entries and post them on social media, and developing a synonym-based game. It was training new lexicographers.
巴雷特设计了一个阅读计划，旨在帮助标记新兴词汇并加速新增，使网站年度定期更新中新词数量增加了三倍。2024 年 2 月的推广计划中包含了 Barbiecore、bed rotting、slow fashion、range anxiety 和 enshitification 等词汇，而美国语言学会一个月前已将其中 enshitification 选为 2023 年度词汇。（在这些词汇中，只有 enshitification 后来被梅里亚姆词典收录，但仅收录在一个新的俚语门户中，而非官方词典。）词典编纂团队正在修订数据库，以便更快地更新词条并在社交媒体上发布，同时开发一个基于同义词的游戏。他们正在培训新的词典编纂人员。
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3 W' X9 o8 ^! Q1 i8 u  V/ N. dDictionary.com couldn’t match Merriam’s history or reputation. Instead, the company was trying to position itself to “capture language at the pace of change,” to be “hipper and more experimental, but also rigorous AF,” Kelly said. (Dictionary.com added the slang initialism for as fuck ; Merriam still has not.)
词典网无法与梅里亚姆的历史声誉相媲美。相反，该公司正试图将自己定位为“以变化的步伐捕捉语言”，要“更潮、更具实验性，但也极其严谨”，凯利说道。（词典网添加了俚语缩写词 as fuck；而梅里亚姆词典至今仍未添加。）

The piecemeal efforts improved the dictionary’s quality and cool quotient. Barrett also loved the work: He was surrounded by colleagues who cared about language and how it was presented, verbally and visually. For a time, Barrett could plug his fingers in his ears and tune out the sobering reality: Although he and his colleagues were getting paid well, “the dictionary business was crumbling,” he said. “So ride it ’til the wheels fall off. And the wheels fell off.”
零敲碎打的努力提升了词典的质量和吸引力。巴雷特也热爱这份工作：他周围都是关心语言及其口头和视觉呈现方式的同事。一段时间里，巴雷特可以捂住耳朵，屏蔽令人沮丧的现实：尽管他和同事们薪水丰厚，但他表示，“词典行业正在崩溃。” “那就骑到轮子掉为止。而轮子确实掉了。”

Not long after Rock Holdings took over, the industry grew more challenging. Google’s “knowledge boxes” were hogging the top of search pages with definitions licensed from the British dictionary publisher Oxford, including synonyms, antonyms, and, eventually and predictably, AI-generated summaries of words’ meanings. The proprietary clutter pushed down traditional-dictionary links, and Dictionary .com’s traffic fell by about 40 percent. At the same time, the pandemic drained advertising revenue. The site tried to stanch the decline with more ads, only to create a worse user experience.
不久之后，随着洛克控股公司接管，行业变得更加具有挑战性。谷歌的“知识框”占据了搜索页面的顶部，使用从英国词典出版商牛津获得的定义，包括同义词、反义词，最终也毫不意外地出现了 AI 生成的词语含义摘要。专有内容的杂乱压低了传统词典链接的排名，Dictionary.com 的流量下降了约 40%。同时，疫情也侵吞了广告收入。网站试图通过增加广告来遏制下滑，结果却造成了更糟糕的用户体验。
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& f& D7 z+ n) X, T: x  iRead: Who made the Oxford English Dictionary?
阅读：谁编撰了《牛津英语词典》？
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Dictionary.com rolled out a K–12 online tutoring service, AI writing software, and other education products. None of it aligned with a dictionary’s mission, and none of it worked, staffers said. Then, as interest rates rose, revenue at Gilbert’s core mortgage business plunged, resulting in nearly $400 million in losses. Even for a billionaire who was in the comparatively low-budget dictionary business less for profit than for fun, the bottom line mattered, and the pressure to make money and cut costs was inescapable.
《词典.com 推出 K-12 在线辅导服务、AI 写作软件及其他教育产品。据员工称，这些产品与词典的使命毫无关联，也毫无成效。随后，随着利率上升，Gilbert 核心房贷业务的收入大幅下滑，导致亏损近 4 亿美元。即使是这位以相对低预算经营词典业务、盈利远不如乐趣的亿万富翁，底线也至关重要，赚钱和削减成本的压力也无可逃避。

( ?' n" V' r; K; aIn April 2024, Rock Holdings announced that it had sold Dictionary.com to IXL Learning, the owner of Rosetta Stone, Vocabulary.com, and other online ed-tech brands. Within a month, IXL laid off all of the dictionary’s full-time lexicographers and dumped most of its freelancers. Including non-lexicography staff, Dictionary.com had started 2024 with about 80 employees. After the sale, only a handful remained. (A representative for IXL said that the company retained some of the freelancers, brought in its own lexicographers, and now has a staff larger than it was at the time of the acquisition.)
7 A+ z6 t0 n& b  L# ^, ^: g2024 年 4 月，Rock Holdings 宣布已将词典.com 出售给 IXL Learning，即罗塞塔石碑、词汇.com 等在线教育科技品牌的拥有者。一个月内，IXL 解雇了词典的所有全职词典学家，并解雇了大多数自由职业者。包括非词典学员工在内，词典.com 在 2024 年初拥有约 80 名员工。出售后，仅剩下寥寥数人。（IXL 代表表示，该公司保留了一些自由职业者，引入了自己的词典学家，目前员工规模已超过收购时的水平。）
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" T0 O( E; ^  N7 o9 IWhen he lost his job, Barrett wasn’t bitter, or surprised. Dictionary.com hadn’t aspired to have a full staff in the tradition of the books on which it was based, he said. It didn’t have Merriam’s advertiser base, print backlist, or historical mission to preserve, protect, and define American English. Barrett understood its more circumscribed project. “Dictionary content is expensive,” Barrett said. “Just the cost of lexicographers—people are expensive, and the output is low. It is very difficult to justify that just for the sake of completism. You will never have enough staff to keep up. People are too productive in the creation of language.”
1 ~1 C' G7 V" B- F当巴雷特失业时，他并不感到痛苦或惊讶。他说，Dictionary.com 并没有像其基础书籍那样，立志拥有一个完整的员工团队。它没有默里姆的广告基础、印刷版后名单，也没有保护、维护和定义美式英语的历史使命。巴雷特理解它的更受限制的项目。“词典内容很昂贵，”巴雷特说，“仅仅是编纂词典专家的成本——人很贵，产出却很低。为了完整性而这样做是很难证明的。你永远不会有足够的员工来保持更新。人们在语言创造方面太有效率了。”
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& Q9 K, c$ I7 \( O. f- g7 o0 s& J) zIt’s hard to know what future business model might save the industry. Getting swallowed by a tech giant expecting hockey-stick growth has proved untenable. A billionaire willing to let the dictionary just be the dictionary—a self-sustaining company with a modest staff performing an outsize cultural job that might not always be profitable—looks less likely after Dan Gilbert’s foray. A grand national dictionary project—some collaboration among government, private, nonprofit, and academic institutions—feels like the Platonic ideal. But with universities and intellectual inquiry under assault in 2025, I’m not holding my breath.
很难知道哪种商业模式可能拯救这个行业。被科技巨头吞并并期待 hockey-stick 增长已被证明是不可持续的。一位愿意让词典仅仅是词典——一家自给自足的公司，拥有精简的员工执行巨大的文化任务，这可能并不总是盈利——的亿万富翁似乎在 Dan Gilbert 的尝试之后不太可能了。一个宏伟的国家词典项目——政府、私营、非营利和学术机构之间的某种合作——感觉像是柏拉图式的理想。但在 2025 年大学和学术探究受到攻击的情况下，我并不抱太大希望。
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At Merriam-Webster, the standard capitalist model is working, at least for now, as is its hybrid print-digital approach. The publisher has rebounded from its mid-2010s struggles. It was a social-media darling during the first Trump administration, racking up likes and retweets for its smart-alecky and politically subversive social-media persona. (When Donald Trump tweeted “unpresidented” instead of “unprecedented,” the Merriam account responded: “Good morning! The #WordOfTheDay is … not ‘unpresidented’. We don’t enter that word. That’s a new one.”) Britannica invested in software, hardware, and humans to enable Merriam to better navigate Google’s algorithms. Merriam added a phalanx of games, including Wordle knockoffs and a dictionary-based crossword, to attract and retain visitors.
5 t; E# [" {% X6 Y. V在梅里亚姆-韦伯斯特公司，标准资本主义模式目前仍在运作，其混合印刷数字模式也不例外。这家出版社已经从 2010 年代中期的困境中反弹。在特朗普第一任期内，它曾是社交媒体的宠儿，因其机智诙谐且具有政治颠覆性的社交媒体形象而积累了大量点赞和转发。（当唐纳德·特朗普在推特上用“unpresidented”代替“unprecedented”时，梅里亚姆账号的回应是：“早上好！#每日一词是……不是‘unpresidented’。我们不收录这个词。那是个新词。”）大英百科全书投资于软件、硬件和人力，以帮助梅里亚姆更好地应对谷歌的算法。梅里亚姆增加了大量游戏，包括 Wordle 仿制品和基于词典的填字游戏，以吸引和留住访客。
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Merriam has outlasted a long line of American dictionaries. But plenty of household media names have been humbled by the shifting habits of digital consumers. Even before Google’s AI Overview began taking clicks from definitions written by flesh-and-bone lexicographers, the trajectory of the industry was clear.
梅里亚姆公司已经超越了众多美国词典公司。但许多家庭媒体品牌已被数字消费者不断变化的习惯所挑战。即使在谷歌的 AI 概览开始抢走由真人词典学家编写的定义点击之前，该行业的趋势已经十分明显。

" A( C- f: O' l) ^: l" Z0 }+ IAfter Merriam shut down its online unabridged revision, I stuck around the company’s 85-year-old brick headquarters, reporting and defining. I eventually drafted about 90 definitions. Most of them didn’t make the cut. But a handful are enshrined online, including politically charged terms such as microaggression and alt-right, and whimsical ones such as sheeple and, yes, dogpile.
6 w0 Z& i& h; g2 p# m梅里亚姆公司停止了其在线 unabridged 修订后，我留在了这家拥有 85 年历史的砖砌总部，进行报道和定义工作。最终我起草了大约 90 个定义。其中大部分没有被选中。但少数几个被在线收录，包括具有政治色彩的术语，如 microaggression 和 alt-right，以及一些俏皮的说法，如 sheeple 和，是的，dogpile。

While I’m proud of these small contributions to lexicography, my wanderings through dictionary culture convinced me of something far more important: the urgent need to save this slowly fading business. Twenty years ago, an estimated 200 full-time commercial lexicographers were working in the United States; today the number is probably less than a quarter of that. At a time when contentious words dominate our conversations—think insurrection and fascism and fake news and woke—the need for dictionaries to chronicle and explain language, and serve as its watchdog, has never been greater.
虽然我为这些对词典学的小小贡献感到自豪，但我在词典文化中的探索让我意识到一个更重要的问题：拯救这个逐渐式微的行业迫在眉睫。20 年前，美国估计有 200 名全职商业词典编纂者在工作；而今天这个数字可能不到四分之一。在充满争议性词汇的今天——想想 insurrection、fascism、fake news 和 woke——词典记录和解释语言，并充当其监督者的必要性从未如此重要。
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7 i& d- `; n1 B8 @6 ^0 l' q6 PThis article was adapted from Stefan Fatsis’s new book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary. It appears in the October 2025 print edition with the headline “Whither the Dictionary?”
8 M% l0 b% T. @6 q4 `; J本文改编自斯特凡·法蒂斯的新书《Unabridged：现代词典的激动与威胁》。它出现在 2025 年 10 月的印刷版中，标题为“词典何去何从？”

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* V( |( v1 {  g8 E& h7 g总结一下文中的重要信息：
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（1）Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged（韦三）不会再有新版了，不会修订了，不会有韦四了
（2）美国词典业一蹶不振一路走下坡。Random House 的词典停更了，Webster’s New World Dictionary 停更了，American Heritage Dictionary 也快死了（原话说「infrequently updated」还算客气）
（3）也就 Merriam-Webster、Dictionary.com 两家苟延残喘，Dictionary.com 曾经被一位热爱词典的大富豪收购，那一阵子Dictionary.com 活力四射，不过只是回光返照，后来这位大富豪资产缩水了，就把 Dictionary.com 出售给Rosetta Stone, Vocabulary.com的那一家了，裁了好多员。作者还顺便讲了google和AI如何害惨了词典业。
（4）Merriam-Webster 活得还行吧，不过反正Unabridged（韦三）不会再修订了。此外人员流失严重：20 年前，美国估计有 200 名全职商业词典编纂者——今天这个数字可能不到四分之一。
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好了，文章的信息分享完了，下面说说我的感想：

（1）作者 Stefan Fatsis 是个记者、专栏写手，原先做体育报道的，活了62岁了见识依然浅薄，何以见得呢？文章讲的明明只是美国的英语词典濒临末日了，网络版标题「Is This the End of the Dictionary?」、印刷版标题「Whither the Dictionary?」硬暗示是全人类的，只能说……我看他的新书 Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary 大约不值得买。文中说他写了大概90个词条释义，只有几个过关了，大概也是文字底子不太行吧。
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（2）话说回来，这么寒碜的作者，都看出来美国词典业青黄不接、人才凋零、每况愈下、没得钱赚，那应该就真的是板上钉钉没戏了 —— 对于热爱英语词典的人来说，这应该是个坏消息：以后再也不会有像过去那样精彩纷呈、百花齐放的精良美式英语词典可以享用了。当然从钱包的角度也许是个好消息。
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（3）作者是美国人，井底之蛙一个，不爱提英国词典业的事儿，不过我们也不难猜：啊最近是哪家英国词典商自己出不了新版，授权让中国的外研社出中国特色新版呀？是驰名天下的朗什么、什么文呀？英国的Oxford English Dictionary第三版还没修订完呢，还有戏没戏呀？……

5 m* k6 ]6 Z8 n5 \, P/ M5 v（4）作者说 Dictionary.com 有一阵子活力四射，这我当初察觉到了，还做了好几个mdx来着，不过即便是被超爱词典的大富豪包养，也免不了资产缩水被抛弃的命运，只能说很可惜咯

! z% s5 X9 [1 {- H9 {（5）作者讨论了半天google的影响、AI的影响，我都懒得复述了，毕竟没什么新见解。崔健说：「不是我不明白，是这个世界变化快」，作者2015年进 Merriam-Webster 没多久，Unabridged（韦三）就放弃掉了，以后更惨烈的地震还多着哪。

  R+ L: y% B- J1 N0 K2 e# e# K: ]（6）我算是热爱英语词典的人，不过我也同样爱汉语的，所以说嘛，这文章对我影响不大，咱就是说呀，市面上的汉语词典，一个能跟 Merriam-Webster 、Oxford、American Heritage Dictionary 比质量的都没有，都还没登顶过，别人英语辞书衰落了，关汉语辞书什么事儿嘛！Unabridged（韦三）不会有新版了固然可惜，不过钱锺书读它也过了一辈子，老词典不是照样可以用嘛！

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5 `' X9 o8 o. M/ @& b. S嗯！——我知道有人爱私信问我要不要做某些很精彩的英语词典，我近几年是真没空看私信，也真没空再做英语词典，所以这是个好消息——以后再也不会有这么多精彩的英语词典啦！想做可以慢慢做，啊哈哈哈

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oversky

日本的辞典业界感觉还行。
3 l, }( `( ?) i4 R日本国语大辞典第三版预计 2032 年出。
+ V. s# q& x6 g9 Q' v很多出版社纸版、app、网页版都有在出。

Bartleby

https://www.theatlantic.com/maga ... e-evolution/683976/

Bartleby

oversky 发表于 2025-11-30 17:39
/ }" ]" h5 N; z2 O3 q日本的辞典业界感觉还行。
日本国语大辞典第三版预计 2032 年出。
8 V6 Q' q9 l' Q7 I& D0 R1 S很多出版社纸版、app、网页版都有在出。 ...

# _  `! [$ [. f9 D5 f日本算是个另类。

: ?3 W# L! l* f, ]; q可能与定价高有关。

白夜

oversky 发表于 2025-11-30 17:39
6 i. T) T( b: @9 V/ }日本的辞典业界感觉还行。
日本国语大辞典第三版预计 2032 年出。
很多出版社纸版、app、网页版都有在出。 ...

应该也不太行了吧，除了日国3，还有望更新的中大型就是广辞苑以及大辞林了。
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眼下，各社更新最频繁的都是学生用辞典（初阶和中阶，高阶更新也放缓），成人以及专业人员用的大型基本都很难再有更新。

4 a2 s" k6 M  o) U- ?6 [1 p附上2025年最新版学生辞典推荐：
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来源：https://www.kendenblog.com/entry/2020-05-29-233543

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sunmingli

日本研究社的新英大辞典也有二十多年没更新了。