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'Funk & Wagnalls' is a publisher based in New York City. Isaac Kaufmann Funk founded the business in 1876 as 'I.K. Funk & Company'. The firm's first publication was the ''Metropolitan Pulpit''. In 1877, Adam Willis Wagnalls, one of Funk's classmates at Wittenberg College, now Wittenberg University, joined the firm as a partner. The two changed the name of the firm to 'Funk & Wagnalls Company' in 1890.
Prior to 1890, F. & W. published only religious-oriented works. The publication of ''The Literary Digest'' in 1890 marked a change for the firm to a publisher of general reference dictionaries and encyclopedias. The firm followed in 1894 with its most memorable publication, ''The Standard Dictionary of the English Language'' ⁽⁾. 1912 saw the publication of the ''Funk & Wagnalls Standard Encyclopedia.'' ⁽⁾
In 1953, the firm began to sell its reference publications through a supermarket continuity marketing campaign, encouraging consumers to include the latest volume of the encyclopedia on their shopping lists. By 1971, the company, known as 'Funk & Wagnalls, Inc.' had been bought by Reader's Digest Association in 1965 and then again by the firm Dun & Bradstreet. In subsequent years, the publication rights to the company's reference works (aside from the encyclopedia) were acquired by other firms.
The publication rights to the encyclopedia were spun off by Dun & Bradstreet in 1983, and were bought up once more in 1990 by K-III Holdings Inc. In 1998, as part of the Information division of Primedia Inc. (renamed K-III Holdings), ''Funk & Wagnalls Standard Encyclopedia'' became the website funkandwagnalls.com. This short-lived venture was shut down in 2001. The encyclopedia exists today only as ''Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia,'' an electronic reference provided to educational institutions by the World Almanac Education Group.
Some content from the encyclopedia became a part of Microsoft's ''Encarta'' digital encyclopedia.
In the 1960's, Funk and Wagnalls became part of one of the iconic jokes on the ground-breaking show ''Laugh-In'', where a frequently-made reference was "Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls", a play on the perceived profanity when speaking the word "funk".