Erin McKean Biography

Erin McKean's job as a lexicographer involves living in a constant state of research. She searches high and low -- from books to blogs newspapers to cocktail parties -- for new words new meanings for old words or signs that old words have fallen out of use. In June of this year she involved us all in the search by launching Wordnik an online dictionary that houses all the traditionally accepted words and definitions but also asks users to contribute new words and new uses for old words. Wordnik pulls real-time examples of word usage from Twitter image representations from Flickr along with many more non-traditional and highly useful features.
Before Wordnik McKean was one of the youngest editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary . She continues to serve as the editor of the language quarterly Verbatim (language and linguistics for the layperson since 1974) and is the author of multiple books including That's Amore and the entire Weird and Wonderful Words series. All that and she maintains multiple blogs too: McKean is the keen observationalist behind A Dress a Day and Dictionary Evangelist. Is there anything she can't do? Surprisingly she is notoriously bad at Scrabble.
Ms. McKean is part of the next wave of top lexicographers who have already or may soon take over guardianship of the nation's language and who disprove Samuel Johnson's definition of a lexicographer as 'a harmless drudge.'

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