Time-Travelling with Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary

Leif Batuman:

I like to think that I know a lot of words, but I definitely don’t know all of them. The other day I came across a new one, on page 2 of Michael Robbins’s new book, “Equipment for Living,” in a quote from the critic Kenneth Burke: “Surely the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art, arising in complex civilizations, could be considered as designed to organize and command the army of one’s thoughts and images.” I did not feel, at first, that I had to look up “alembicated,” because it was clear from the context that the word basically meant “sophisticated,” and also because I knew that an alembic was some kind of glassware, and this seemed, at the time, like enough knowledge. But then I came to a second instance: “I assume that what Burke says about poetry applies, mutatis mutandis, to the songs of Def Leppard, though they are hardly alembicated at all.” This usage sounded somehow more specific than the first, and it made me realize that I didn’t know the lyrics to even one Def Leppard song. Now I felt inadequate, and had to Google something.
I thought for a while about which to investigate, Def Leppard or “alembicated,” and decided on the latter. Indeed, it basically meant “sophisticated,” like something boiled for a long time in an alembic, or, to quote Merriam-Webster, “overrefined as if by excessive distillation.” Then, just as I was about to leave the dictionary’s Web site, I noticed something new: next to the earliest known year that a word appears in print—for “alembicated,” 1786—Merriam-Webster now offers a link to a list of all the other words that were first used in the same year. The feature is called Time Traveler, and it has indeed enabled me to travel in time, because once I start looking at it I find that hours have passed. What could be more bewitching than to see, under a given year, all the words that it birthed, like a squirming litter of word-kittens? In an effort to save the public some of the time I myself have lost in this fashion, I will endeavor to summarize my findings.