Urdang loved words and language, and in graduate school studied Russian, German, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and Polish. He taught linguistics for several years, but decided to change careers: he became an editor of dictionaries.
After cutting his teeth at Funk and Wagnalls he moved to Random House, where he was in charge of a new project: the gigantic (9.25-pound, 2,091-page) unabridged Random House Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1966. It was the first major dictionary to be organized on a computer.
But Urdang didn’t rest on that laurel; he founded his own publishing company in 1969, and 1974 he started a newsletter on language, Verbatim, which I discovered shortly after high school. It helped me realize that I too loved the power of language, which led me to drop my career in Emergency Medical Services and return to college at 21 — Journalism school, so I could learn to research and write quickly. I turned those skills toward my own newsletter, This is True.
Urdang’s company published more than 150 dictionaries and language reference books. He died August 21 from congestive heart failure at 81.
Author’s Note: When I moved out of my house in 2023, I still had my collection of Verbatim. I donated them to the Internet Archive, where they filled several holes in their collection.