Short answers, pulled from the story.
Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language was first published in 1951 by the World Publishing Company of Cleveland, Ohio. The original edition appeared in two volumes or one large volume and included a large encyclopedic section.
As of 2022, Webster's New World Dictionary is owned by HarperCollins Publishers. The dictionary passed through several publishers over its history, including World Publishing Company, Simon and Schuster, John Wiley and Sons, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Webster's New World Dictionary is not related to Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster's dictionaries descend directly from Noah Webster's original publications, while Webster's New World uses the Webster name only as a generic term for an American English dictionary, as does Random House with its own Webster's-branded line.
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and United Press International all designate the Webster's New World College Dictionary as their official desk dictionary. The AP Stylebook relied on it as its primary dictionary from 1977 until 2024, when it switched to Merriam-Webster.
The fifth edition of Webster's New World College Dictionary contains around 165,000 entries across 1,703 pages in its 2014 printing. A 2020 printing of the same fifth edition expanded to 1,728 pages. The original 1953 college edition contained 142,000 entries.
Webster's New World Dictionary is known for its unusually full etymology, tracing the origin and development of words and their relationships to other Indo-European languages. It also labels words with a distinctly American origin, treating the history of American English as a subject worth explicit documentation.