Merriam-Webster

Merriam-Webster is the leading dictionary in America, and the descendant of Noah Webster's dictionaries.

However, it has many errors and biases:

• The date for eminent domain is incorrect: 1738. The term was used as early as 1625.
• The description of pogrom is not precisely correct. Merriam-Webster calls it an organized massacre of helpless people. Pogrom is a Yiddish term used in Russian beginning in the late 1800s to describe an organized campaign of violence (not always a "massacre") against Jewish people in Russia.
• The entry for Yiddish is too narrow in describing it as a language of Jewish residents and descendants of only central and eastern Europe. Yiddish is spoken worldwide.
• Capital is poorly defined as accumulated goods, or the value of those goods, or net worth. It is more commonly used to mean liquid assets such as cash, stocks, bonds that can be easily used to acquire goods and services.
• The definition of group theory uses "group" to define itself. Worse, the definition is so vague as to be useless ("finding all mathematical groups and determining their properties").
• Merriam-Webster resists including new conservative terms, such as judicial activism, which dates back to 1947 and has been repeatedly used by the U.S. Supreme Court since 1967, yet is still not included by Merriam-Webster.
• Merriam-Webster also omits the term the "invisible hand."
• It gives the following liberal example of use of the derogatory term "hell-bent": "hell-bent to cut taxes again."
• It gives the following liberal example of use of the term "force-feed": "force-feed" students with the classics."

Merriam-Webster uses a disproportionate number of examples from liberal publications, such as the New York Times, for illustrating how terms are used.

For a criticism of the dictionary treatment of the "Common Era," see CE.

External Links

• Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary