Writing

Blogs

I have been blogging intermittently at A Dress A Day since 2005. That’s a lot of dresses! If you are looking for the “You Don’t Have to Be Pretty” post, it’s here.

There is also a semi-defunct word-stuff blog here.

Books

I have written:

• one novel, The Secret Lives of Dresses. (Soon to be an Australian Motion Picture!)

• The Hundred Dresses, a field guide to dresses.

• Weird and Wonderful Words, More Weird and Wonderful Words, and Totally Weird and Wonderful Words. (Protip: if you’re going to buy one of these, buy Totally, it’s the combination of the first two plus … extra words.)

• That’s Amore!: The Language of Love for Lovers of Language

and edited:

• Verbatim: From the bawdy to the sublime, the best writing on language for word lovers, grammar mavens, and armchair linguists

Essays of mine also appear in:

• The 5 Minute Linguist: Bite-Sized Essays on Language and Languages
• Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto (Read the essay “Making Books Out of Words”)

Fiction:

• The short story “Not Waving But Drowning” appears in the anthology The Machine of Death. You can hear me reading it here.

Articles

in The New York Times:

• The Wise Words of Maya Angelou. Or Someone, Anyway. (Op-Ed April 9, 2015)
• Using Undictionaried Words, (Opinionator June 4, 2012)
• Redefining Definition (On Language December 17, 2009)
• Corpus (On Language July 29, 2007)
• Lexicographer (On Language November 11, 2004)
• Neologist (On Language, August 25, 2002)

at The Pastry Box Project:

• Thank You So Much For Your Email!, (July 1, 2015)
• Why Women Cry, Or, Wenches With Wrenches, (May 1, 2015)
• On “Futurekindness”, (March 11, 2015)

on Medium:

• My Favorite Words (and some phrases) from TED2018
• Debugging Tips for Hackathons
• The Productivity Tool Every Developer Should Be Using
• Create a simple, free, text-driven Twitterbot with AWS Lambda & Node.js
• Why I Love XOXO, or, “Don’t Cry, Organize”

elsewhere:

• Expert Sitings, (Foreign Policy, October 14, 2009)
• “The Last Word: Dictionary evangelist Erin McKean taps the best word resources online, (School Library Journal, July 1, 2010)
• Of course “twerk” belongs in the dictionary—it’s been around for 20 years, (Quartz, August 30, 2013)
• Five Things I Learned as a Female Founder (Huffington Post, February 4, 2014)
• Stitches and startups: 5 entrepreneurial lessons from my life as a dressmaker (Upstart Business Journal, August 20, 2014)
• Faved for Posterity (Offscreen Magazine, No. 12)
• Diana Vreeland Writes a Technology Help Column, (The Toast, November 17, 2015)
• Bin Ladens, Tubmans, and Benjamins: What we talk about when we talk about cash (Timeline, May 10, 2016)

Papers

McKean, Erin, and Will Fitzgerald. “The ROI of AI in Lexicography.” Lexicography (2024). [https://doi.org/10.1558/lexi.27569]

Review of The Last Word: The English Language, Opinions and Prejudices. Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 29 (2008): 85-86. https://doi.org/10.1353/dic.2008.0003.

“Dictionary Activities in the Elementary Classroom: News for Lexicographers.” Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 21 (2000): 81-89. https://doi.org/10.1353/dic.2000.0001.

“Biographical Entries in a Children’s School Dictionary.” Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 19 (1998): 135-146. https://doi.org/10.1353/dic.1998.0007.