After 30 years of software development, David McAdams was looking for something new to do. He turned his attention to math instruction. Through his coursework at Utah Valley University, he learned how critical vocabulary acquisition is to all learning, and especially to math. Math has long been regarded as its having its own language, with its own syntax and symbols. The acquisition of this language has been found to be a barrier to many students.

When approaching his teaching internship, Mr. McAdams started to extend the existing course of instruction with activities designed to help student learn the language of math. However, as he looked for resources to which he could refer his students, he found that there was certainly no single resource, and in fact no combination of resources that students at the intermediate algebra level could use to find all the definitions they might need during coursework. While still working as a teaching intern, Mr. McAdams started to collect a list of words along with definitions useful to his students.

After the completion of his internship, Mr. McAdams continued to develop this list into a comprehensive dictionary, written for middle school and high school math students. All Math Words Dictionary is the culmination of eight years work.