Erin McKean (born 1971) is an American lexicographer, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read full biography of Erin McKean →
Twitter is like overhearing people's conversations, which is exactly what dictionary editors have been wishing we could do for years.
We think people go to a dictionary to find out what a word means. Most people go to the dictionary because they don't want to look stupid.
What I'm interested in is how people are reading and writing English.
Words take on many different meanings.
I think we would all like to believe that every new event demands a new word. But we're environmentally conscious with our words. We recycle... →
It's difficult to choose a Word of the Year in the year that you're in. It's one of those things that hindsight makes more apparent.... →
Twitter has already birthed an entire ecosystem of other sites that extend its power or interact with it. But Twitter isn't just a platform for... →
Writers who hedge their use of unfamiliar, infrequent, or informal words with 'I know that's not a real word,' hoping to distance... →
Erin McKean (born 1971) is an American lexicographer, based in the San Francisco Bay Area.