For Peter Sokolowski, a high-profile event like the 9/11 attacks
or the 2012 vice-presidential debate is not just news. It's a
"vocabulary event" that sends readers racing to their
dictionaries. Sokolowski is editor at large for Merriam-Webster,
whose red-and-blue-jacketed Collegiate Dictionary still sits on
the desk of many a student and editor. In a print-only era, it
would have been next to impossible for him to track vocabulary
events. Samuel Johnson, the grand old man of the modern
dictionary, "could have spent a week or a month writing a given
word's definition and could never have known if anyone read it,"
he says. Today, Sokolowski can and does monitor what visitors to
the Merriam-Webster Web site look up—as they're doing it. With
the spread of digital technologies, dictionaries have become a
two-way mirror, a record not just of words' meanings but of what
we want to know. Digital dictionaries read us. The days of
displaying a thick Webster's in the parlor may be past, but
dictionaries inhabit our dai