Paul Dickson

Paul Dickson has written a dozen word books and dictionaries, including Words from the White House, The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary, The Congress Dictionary (with Paul Clancy), Slang and Drunk. He was awarded a grant from NASA to create a Dictionary of the Space Age (2009) and was a contributing editor to Merriam-Webster and in charge of the Lighter Side of Language series. An occasional contributor to the late William Safire’s “On Language” column in The New York Times, Dickson has coined several words of his own, including “demonym” (the name for a person from a specific locality, e.g., New Yorker). He lives in Maryland.