Erin McKean is co-founder and CEO of Wordnik, a fun and new way for people to learn about and discover words. Erin was most recently editor in chief for American Dictionaries at Oxford University Press. She is the editor of the irregularly-published recreational-linguistics journal VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly, and the author of Weird and Wonderful Words, More Weird and Wonderful Words, Totally Weird and Wonderful Words and That’s Amore (also about words). Previously, she was the editorial manager for the Thorndike-Barnhart Dictionaries at ScottForesman, a Pearson company.
She has served on the board of the Dictionary Society of North America and on the editorial board for its journal, Dictionaries, as well as on the editorial board for the journal of the American Dialect Society, American Speech. She also serves on the advisory boards of the Wikimedia Foundation, Credo Reference, and the Dictionary of American Regional English. She has a BA/MA in Linguistics from the University of Chicago.
