# Encyclopaedia Britannica **Entity class:** Reference work and company (Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.) **Domain:** Reference Authority / Publishing / Machine Intelligence **Concept Hub:** [[wiki/Lexicographic Succession|Lexicographic Succession]] **Aliases:** Encyclopædia Britannica; Britannica ## Definition **The *Encyclopaedia Britannica* is the reference work founded in Edinburgh in 1768 by Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell, the longest continuously published English-language encyclopedia, and the company that now owns [[wiki/Merriam-Webster|Merriam-Webster]].** ## Transatlantic Migration Americans Horace E. Hooper and Walter M. Jackson bought the Britannica in 1901; Sears, Roebuck owned it outright from 1920; Sears transferred it to the University of Chicago in 1941, with William Benton supplying capital and later taking ownership; the Chicago company acquired Merriam-Webster in 1964 and ended print publication in 2012 after 244 years. The Scottish Enlightenment's inventory of the known world became an American corporate asset, a corporate form of *translatio studii* ([[wiki/Translatio Imperii|Translatio Imperii]]). ## Machine-Age Contest Britannica and Merriam-Webster sued Perplexity in the Southern District of New York on September 11, 2025, and sued OpenAI in the same court in March 2026, alleging that answer engines copy their content and substitute for it; the OpenAI complaint reports ChatGPT returning Merriam-Webster's definition of "plagiarize" verbatim. The allegations are unadjudicated. [[articles/war with empire/Authorship of the West|Authorship of the West]] reads the suits as the reference layer entering its generative stage; [[articles/The New Dictionary of the Machine Regime|The New Dictionary of the Machine Regime]] places them in the regime-indexing of political vocabulary. ## Relationships - **Concepts:** [[wiki/Lexicographic Succession|Lexicographic Succession]] · [[wiki/Generative Canon|Generative Canon]] · [[wiki/Authorship of the West|Authorship of the West]]. - **Subsidiary:** [[wiki/Merriam-Webster|Merriam-Webster]]; **counterpart:** [[wiki/Oxford English Dictionary|Oxford English Dictionary]]. - **Adversaries in litigation:** [[wiki/OpenAI|OpenAI]]. - **Source articles:** [[articles/war with empire/Authorship of the West|Authorship of the West]]. - **September 2026 threading:** [[wiki/Grokipedia|Grokipedia]] (a proprietor-built machine encyclopedia) · [[wiki/Reopened Choice Space|Reopened Choice Space]]. ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > “OpenAI imperils the very market for the high-quality content that it copies and reproduces.” > **— Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster**, *complaint against OpenAI, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, March 2026* [[reminders/Capture/OpenAI Imperils the Market for the Content It Copies by Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster|OpenAI Imperils the Market for the Content It Copies by Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster]] ## Sources / Provenance - [Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica,_Inc.) (corporate history; accessed September 22, 2026). - [Britannica, Merriam-Webster Sue Perplexity For Alleged Copyright Infringement](https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/408882/britannica-merriam-webster-sue-perplexity-for-all.html) (MediaPost, September 12, 2025). - [Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sue OpenAI](https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/16/merriam-webster-openai-encyclopedia-brittanica-lawsuit/) (TechCrunch, March 16, 2026); [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/03/18/dictionaries-suing-openai-chatgpt-copyright-infringement/) (March 18, 2026).