If Wikipedia had decided to call itself something other than “the free encyclopaedia” (“the place where you find stuff”, say, or “the place where siblings of celebrities create their own profiles so that they feel important”, or any number of other relevant descriptors) most children alive today would never have encountered the word “encyclopaedia”.

I did not grow up in a particularly wealthy home, but one thing we had that few of my classmates did was an enviable set of encyclopaedias...