| Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993. |
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| DICTIONARIES |
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| are of several kinds, and American English is well served in each classification. The most universally useful of dictionaries is the desk or collegiate dictionary, a peculiarly American contribution to lexicography. Desk dictionaries are inexpensive and portable, and they are usually the most nearly current of our dictionaries, because revisions and new editions appear frequently. A good desk dictionary is one of the greatest book bargains available anywhere—some fourteen to fifteen hundred pages of up-to-the-minute information about the spelling, pronunciation, forms, meanings, origins, and usage of the most-used words in the vocabulary, plus a mine of encyclopedic information, such as biographical and gazetteer lists, guides to punctuation, and lists of signs, symbols, and abbreviations. College students are urged to have their own, and every literate household should have one too—a recent one. The huge market makes competition among publishers fierce, and Americans can choose from several excellent desk or collegiate dictionaries. Among the current best are Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1983), The American Heritage Dictionary, second college edition (1982; a third edition was published in 1992 [a fourth edition in 2000]), Random House Webster’s College Dictionary (1991), and Webster’s New World Dictionary, third college edition (1988). | 1 |
| Of historical dictionaries, which record not just the present state but the full history of each word, The Oxford English Dictionary (1886–1928) remains the foundation, and its supplements (1972–1986) made it helpful in documenting some of American English’s recent history as well. The second edition (1989) now incorporates the dictionary and all its supplements in a single alphabet. Craigie and Hulbert (1938–1944) and Mathews (1951) are useful for Americanisms prior to World War II. Whitney (1899–1910) was for its time an excellent American historical dictionary, and it remains in many ways the finest (although now outdated) of our encyclopedic dictionaries, a peculiarly American phenomenon, that give full information about people and places and ideas, do not treat only the “lowercase” words in the language, and go well beyond conventional lexicographical information. | 2 |
| The current best of our general unabridged dictionaries is still Merriam’s Third New International (1961), with a strong but different (and slightly smaller) unabridged work being The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, second edition (1987). American English also has a good new dictionary of slang (Chapman 1986), which is profitably used in conjunction with Partridge (1984), and now at last the long-awaited Dictionary of American Regional English has begun to appear (Cassidy 1985; Cassidy and Hall 1991). All this says nothing of the dozens of specialized dictionaries of nearly every possible description, size, special purpose, and quality that American publishers keep in print for the remarkably large American dictionary-buying (if not always dictionary-using) audience. See the bibliography for the names of all the dictionaries consulted in the course of preparing this book. | 3 |
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| | | The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. Copyright © 1993 Columbia University Press. |
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