Blackie's Concise English Dictionary [antikvár]

preface Dr. Annandale's Concise Dictionary, which has won and long maintained a leading place among dictionaries of moderate size, has now been re-set in Perpetua —a modern type of exceptional legibility. In carrying out the re-setting the opportunity has been taken to transfer to the body of the book some two thousand words which hitherto appeared in the Supplement, and also to add some two hundred and fifty words which did not appear anywhere in the earlier editions of the book. The Dictionary will be found to include many of those recent coinages which are generally accepted as legal tender. In order to make room for these additions some obsolete, dialectical, or rare words have been removed. Had this not been done, the volume would have exceeded its limits. A dictionary of moderate size must of necessity be selective in its choice of words admitted. Words are sometimes excluded with regret, simply because their inclusion would mean the sacrifice of even more valuable entries. The definitions and etymologies of well-established words have been carefully revised. In order to condense the matter as much as possible, the method of grouping certain words together in one paragraph, instead of giving each a separate paragraph to itself, has been adopted. Only such words as are closely connected in origin, form, and meaning are thus grouped—the group very often consisting of a primary word followed by a number of derivatives, compounds also being grouped under the word that forms their first element. Besides economizing space, this plan often shows the meaning of the words grouped more satisfactorily than could be done if each were explained by itself. As it is sometimes difficult to decide how far the principle of grouping should be carried, or where to set the limits of a group, no hard-and-fast line has been drawn, convenience and facility of reference being generally allowed to decide the matter. The alphabetical arrangement is disturbed as little as possible ; but when a word is shifted to any great extent from its natural alphabetical position a cross reference is given from this position to the leading word under which it may be found. Hence no reader need have any difficulty in finding the word he wants. In order to save space the more unimportant abstract nouns ending in -ness, and adverbs ending in -ly, have often been omitted altogether or left without a definition, their meaning being made sufficiently clear by the definition of the word from which they are derived.