Kory stamper biography

American lexicographer and writer

Kory Stamper is a lexicographer and former associate editor for the Merriam-Webster family of dictionaries. She is the author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries (Pantheon, 2017).

Early life

Stamper grew up in Colorado. She attended Smith College, where she undertook an interdisciplinary major that involved studying Latin, Greek, Norse, Old English, and Middle English after enrolling in a course on Icelandic family sagas of the 13th and 14th centuries. She says, "I loved the style, the rhythm. They're very bleak, but they have this black humor."

Career

Stamper worked in a college development office before applying for an editorial assistant position with Merriam-Webster in 1998. She left Merriam-Webster after working there for nearly 20 years. She was associate editor at Merriam-Webster for more than ten years. As of 2019, Stamper worked freelance with Cambridge University Press. As of December 2023, she was senior editor of lexicography at Dictionary.com, where she worked until April 2024.

In addition to her editorial duties, she presented many of Merriam-Webster's "Ask the Editor" videos, a series on the publisher's website and YouTube that discusses the English language, especially unusual or controversial words and usages. She undertook speaking engagements on behalf of Merriam-Webster and provides expert advice and response to general enquiries on language and lexicography from the public. Stamper drew attention as the associate editor responsible for explaining the addition of the term "F-bomb" into the dictionary.

Stamper also provides lexicographical and language-related commentary for various media outlets including the Chicago Tribune^&

In Hall on October 9, Ms. Kory Stamper—a lexicographer who spent almost 20 years as an associate editor at Merriam-Webster—led boys and faculty along an informative and entertaining traverse through the English language.

Her talk titled “Is Proper English Proper?” was a brief history of Standard English. She explained how, in England, as books became less expensive and more available to people, social mobility increased; and as England became a center of trade, the language began to adopt more words from other countries— from Dutch, banjo from West African languages, algebra from Arabic.

“As social mobility for the lower and middle classes increased, the upper class no longer had exclusive control of the money, the land, their manners, their writing, so they started adding this weird, mystical sense of moral uprightness to being upper class,” Ms. Stamper explained. “This became tied particularly to how you spoke. If you had a good education and good breeding, naturally you would have good manners—being genteel and gracious—characteristics that are ‘morally superior’ to qualities assigned to the lower classes—such as being grasping or greedy or sloppy—signs of ‘moral and intellectual inferiority’. So, for the first time in the history of English, we had an idea that there was such a thing as good grammar and bad grammar.”

After Hall Ms. Stamper spent the morning in classes, first with all four sections of Class II English, discussing American dialects and Mark Twain’s use of the N-word in Huck Finn—along with the word’s origin, evolution, and history. She then spent a period with boys in Latin 1, answering their questions on various topics—ranging from suffixes to Ecclesiastical Latin to “pig Latin.” Finally, Ms. Stamper met with students

One morning in 2001, Kory Stamper, a lexicographer for Merriam-Webster, arrived at work and was given a single word: “take.” She set to work hunting down examples of where the verb form of the word had been used in the wild, from American Literary History to Us Weekly to Craigslist, and organizing these citations by part of speech and usage. Normally, editors will work on several words in a batch. But smaller, more common words are used so often and in so many different ways that a single one can be an incredible headache to revise. As Stamper explains in her recent book, “Word by Word: the Secret Life of Dictionaries,” such words “don’t just have semantically oozy uses that require careful definition, but semantically drippy uses as well. ‘Let’s do dinner’ and ‘let’s do laundry’ are identical syntactically but feature very different semantic meanings of ‘do.’ ” Lexicographers know that when they’ve been assigned a notorious small word—“do,” “run,” “about,” “take”––they’ve arrived.

This was the most ambitious and slippery project Stamper had taken on, and, at times, as she parsed the differences between “take first things first” and “take a shit,” she felt herself “slowly unspooling into idiocy.” It took two weeks to organize the verb form alone into a hundred and seven different senses and sub-senses; after a month, “take” was finally ready for the eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. In the world of words, however, spending a month perfecting an entry is nowhere near the extreme. At a conference in 2013, a lexicographer from the Oxford English Dictionary told Stamper that when he revised “run” it took him nine months. Dictionary editors trade word stories the way élite marathoners collect courses. For Emily Brewster,

Kory Stamper

Kory Stamper is a lexicographer (that is, a writer and editor of dictionaries) at Merriam-Webster (the dictionary). She has written and appeared in the "Ask the Editor" video series at Merriam-Webster, and has traveled around the world giving talks and lectures on language and lexicography. Her writing has appeared in a number of publications, including The Washington Post, The Guardian and The New York Times. A medievalist by training, she knows a number of languages, most of them dead. She drinks more coffee and owns more dictionaries than is good for anyone.

This biography was last updated on 03/14/2017.

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