He was formerly a language columnist for The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times Magazine, and the editor of American dictionaries at Oxford University Press.

[10] In 2008, Zimmer was appointed executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, an interactive reference tool from Thinkmap, Inc.[11] He edits the online content of the Visual Thesaurus and its sister site Vocabulary.com, and writes a regular column on word origins, "Word Routes".

[1] Zimmer's research on word origins was frequently cited by William Safire's "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine.

In it, Zimmer wrote that the column was "finally coming to a close" and that "it [was] time to bid adieu, after some 1,500 dispatches from the frontiers of language."

On December 18, 2011, The Boston Globe announced that Zimmer would be a regular language columnist for the newspaper's Sunday Ideas section.