Before starting Wordnik, McKean was editor in chief for American Dictionaries at Oxford University Press. She is the editor of the irregularly-published recreational-linguistics journal VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly, and the author of Weird and Wonderful Words, More Weird and Wonderful Words, Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, and That's Amore (also about words). She has served on the editorial board of Dictionaries, the journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, as well as on the editorial board for the journal of the American Dialect Society, American Speech. She also serves on the advisory boards of the Credo Reference and the Dictionary of American Regional English.