Merriam-Webster is not a person but an American publishing company best known for its English dictionaries and reference books.

Quick Scoop: Who (or what) is Merriam-Webster?

  • Merriam-Webster, Incorporated is a U.S. reference publisher famous for its dictionaries and thesauruses.
  • It is regarded as one of America’s leading and most trusted sources of language information and has been publishing for over 150 years.
  • The company is based in Springfield, Massachusetts, and operates both in print and online (for example, merriam-webster.com and active social media accounts).

How the name “Merriam-Webster” came about

  • In 1831, brothers George and Charles Merriam started a printing and bookselling firm called G. & C. Merriam Co. in Springfield, Massachusetts.
  • After the death of lexicographer Noah Webster in 1843, the Merriam brothers bought the rights to his major dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language.
  • Over time, the dictionaries produced by G. & C. Merriam became known as “Merriam-Webster,” and in 1982 the firm formally adopted the name Merriam-Webster, Incorporated.

What Merriam-Webster does today

  • The company publishes general and specialized dictionaries, thesauruses, bilingual dictionaries, and reference works, including the Official Scrabble Dictionary.
  • It maintains a large citation database, collecting real-world uses of words from books, newspapers, and other media to guide dictionary entries.
  • Online, Merriam-Webster runs a popular free dictionary and thesaurus site and engages heavily on platforms like X (Twitter), where posts about word meanings and usage often go viral.

Is Merriam-Webster a person?

  • Strictly speaking, “Merriam-Webster” is a company name, combining the Merriam brothers’ surname with that of Noah Webster.
  • Noah Webster himself was an American lexicographer and language reformer whose work forms the historical foundation of Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries.

TL;DR: When people ask “who is Merriam-Webster,” they’re really referring to a long-running American dictionary publisher (founded by the Merriam brothers and built on Noah Webster’s dictionaries), not a single person.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.