Fowler's Concise English Dictionary [antikvár]

PKEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITIONWHEN we began, more than twenty years ago, th work that took shape as The Concise Oxford Dictionary, we were plunging into the sea of lexicography without having been first taught to swim. But lexicography for us was fortunately of the minor or dependent kind ; and, fortunately alsó, the time was one at which the major or firsthand kind was reaching greater excellence than ever before, and the Oxford English Dictionary, four-íifths completed, already provided popularizers with unlimited material.The object we set before us, hinted at by the word current on our title-page, was to present as vivid a picture as the small dictionary could be made to give of the English that was being spoken and written at the time. The vividness was to be secured by allotting space to words more nearly in proportion to the frequency and variety of their use, and consequently to their practical value, than had been the custom ; and further by an unprecedented abundance of illustrative quotation ; define, and your reader gets a silhouette ; illustrate, and he has it 'in the round \ That at least was our belief ; and we hailed as confirmation of it one or two letters from persons unknown congratulating us on having ' produced a live dictionary or ' treating English at last as a living language \A living language, however, does not remain unchanged through twenty years and a great war ; our picture has needed, and received, a good déal of retouching before being again exhibited in public ; and its owners, the Clarendon Press, ha ve thought it worthy of a slightly larger and more handsome frame, for which I thank them.The originál preface follows, with no change except the interpola-tion, in square brackets, of somé necessary comments, and the in-sertion in our abbreviation-list of somé items that had escaped record.In the dictionary itself, the object and the methods are what theywere, but detailed alterations are numerous, few pages being without them.H. W. F., 1929.