Poets & Writers Theater

“The correct line has that kind of ring of rightness to it. It’s like it’s always been there.” In this Merriam-Webster video, Celeste Ng talks about the sonic, literal, and emotional levels of words and reviews some choices made in her third novel, Our Missing Hearts (Penguin Press, 2022), with playwright Eboni Booth.

“I think the thing that you feel when you get to the right word is that you’ve found the answer to a question.” In this short video, author Gabrielle Zevin walks through parts of her novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Knopf, 2022) and discusses her word choices with John Sabine, social director for Merriam-Webster.

“Genre writing is an amazing place to try new words out as long as you provide good context.” In this video, Stacey Abrams discusses her love of language and word choice, as well as the writing process for her latest novel, While Justice Sleeps (Doubleday, 2021), with Merriam-Webster editors Ammon Shea and Adam Maid.

“People turn to the dictionary for lots of reasons and we can be sure of one thing from this evidence: words matter.” In this video, Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, explains how the 2019 Word of the Year was chosen and what the most looked up words say about our mindset.

Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, explains why there is a special set of shelves in the basement of their offices filled with 315,000 words spelled backwards and catalogued. A Q&A with Sokolowski is featured in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“People think of English as this monolithic thing but it’s really not, it’s much more like a river.” Kory Stamper, associate editor at Merriam-Webster and the author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries (Pantheon, 2017), explains what it’s like to define English words and why there are those dots in the middle of words in the dictionary.