Lexicographer Erin McKean’s interactive ‘Wordnik’ is projected to be the largest online dictionary ever.

This week she is slated to launch what may be the biggest revolution in the printed word since, well, printed words.

McKean was 8 years old when she decided that when she grew up, she wanted to be a lexicographer – the technical term for a writer or editor of dictionaries. She first found it in her daily scouring of The Wall Street Journal. Her father was a Journal devotee [..]

“I think I was really attracted by the fact that it was taking 21 years to make the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary,” she recalls. “I was 8. Twenty-one years was forever.”

The lexicography bug stuck, in part because McKean loved language. She was a voracious reader, plowing through her local libraries’ stacks and devouring anything she found at home, she says. “If it was lying around, I read it. If my parents didn’t want me to read it,” she says, “they had to hide it."