Who owns the American dictionary?

Search those two words. The first four answers are held in Edinburgh, Glasgow, California and Cambridge. Here is the ledger, and here is the work.

— The ledger —

The books an American finds first

Ownership as of August 2026, from the companies' own filings and public record. Founding city is the brand's origin, not the current head office.

Dictionary	Owned by	Held by	Brand founded
Merriam-Webster	Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. acquired 1964	Jacqui Safra, Swiss financier since 1996	Britannica: Edinburgh, 1768 named for Britain in the Latin
American Heritage	HarperCollins from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021	News Corp	Collins: Glasgow, 1819 Harper: New York, 1817
Dictionary.com	IXL Learning acquired April 2024	Private, San Mateo, California previously Rock Holdings, Detroit	An education-software company
Cambridge	Cambridge University Press & Assessment	The University of Cambridge	Cambridge, England, 1534
Standard American	Written by one American	American Languages LLC	The United States, 2026

The dictionary that calls itself America's most trusted is owned by a company named for Britain, founded in Edinburgh, and held by a Swiss financier. The one called American Heritage is published by a house whose Collins half was founded in Glasgow. Neither fact is an accusation — both are matters of record, and both are ordinary in publishing. They are stated here because a country that names its language should know who prints the book.

— The comparison —

Entry by entry

Every quotation below was read on the live site in August 2026. Where another dictionary is good, it is quoted at its best. The question is not who is careless. It is which book organizes an American word around the meaning an American needs first.

Loyalist — the American Revolution

Merriam-Webster

Britannica · Safra

“One who is or remains loyal to a political cause, party, government, or sovereign.” The American Revolution does not appear in the entry.

American Heritage

HarperCollins · News Corp

“One who maintains loyalty to an established government, political party, or sovereign, especially during war or revolutionary change.” Then: “Loyalist See Tory.” A cross-reference, not a definition.

Standard American

American Languages LLC

“In the American Revolution, a colonist who remained loyal to the British Crown; called a Tory by the Patriot side.” With the provincial corps, the sixty thousand who left for Nova Scotia and the Caribbean, and the Black Loyalists who reached British lines under the proclamations of 1775 and 1779 — three thousand entered in the Book of Negroes, twelve hundred sailing on to found Freetown in 1792.

Freedom Ride — 1961

Merriam-Webster

Britannica · Safra

A ride through Southern states “to ascertain whether public facilities … are desegregated.” Ascertain makes it an inspection tour.

American Heritage

HarperCollins · News Corp

“One of a group of civil rights activists in the early 1960s who rode buses through parts of the southern United States for the purpose of challenging racial segregation.” Accurate, and it stops there.

Standard American

American Languages LLC

The riders were not ascertaining anything. Morgan (1946) and Boynton (1960) had already settled the law and it was being ignored; they went to make refusal visible and costly. A bus firebombed outside Anniston on 14 May; beatings at Birmingham and Montgomery; more than three hundred arrested in Jackson, many held at Parchman. The Interstate Commerce Commission order came on 1 November 1961.

More entries, and the full record of what was read and when, are kept with the dictionary itself. Read them there: loyalist · freedom ride · Reconstruction · carpetbagger · redlining.

— The work —

Four standing reference works

Webster's 1828 and 1913 brought forward into a live corpus, and more than a thousand entries written since for the language as it is now — the years no public-domain dictionary reaches.

Vol. I

Standard American Dictionary

Definitions of widely circulated Standard American usage, 1776 to the present.

Open the volume → Vol. II

Standard American Thesaurus

Synonym clusters drawn from press, statute, transcript and letter.

Open the volume → Vol. III

Black American Dictionary

Definitions of Black American usage, with attestation from the corpus.

Open the volume → Vol. IV

Black American Thesaurus

Synonym clusters of Black American usage, by sense and corpus.

Open the volume →