Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary [antikvár]

PREFACEIn 1894 Funk and Wagnalls published the Standard Dictionary of the English Language, parent and ancestor of the eminent line of dictionaries of which this is the latest. Dr. Isaac K. Funk, the editor in chief, was a sound scholar, an energetic manager, and an innovator in lexicography. Only two or perhaps three other Ameri-cans equal him in stature as a maker of dictionaries.Dr. Funk's book was a great success. The distin-guished philologist T. R. Lounsbury of Yale accurately said, "My eonviction of its generál excellence has steadily grown upon me during its perusal. The work deserves the fullest success, and I doubt not will meet with it." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's praise was espe-cially gratifying: "It has become quite a joke with us that we cannot trip up this dictionary. We have several times been sure that we would, but have always failed."This tradition of superiority haunts our office and nourishes our efforts. We work amidst the fine reference library gathered over the years since the 1880's, and always work with a sense, not oppressive, that we have superb models at hand in our own house. Our task in this dictionary is to preserve and improve the quality we learn from those models.Our aim has been to write the best desk dictionary for the alert and inquisitive person of our time. We assume that such a person will read and hear about a broad variety of subjects, and will wish not only a coverage of the generál vocabulary, but somé repre-sentation of particular vocabularies. We have therefore included thousands of terms from science and tech-nology, Iiterature, the arts, religion, government, his-tory, and other fields likely to be encountered by those who listen and read carefully.The main features and systems of the dictionary are graphically displayed in the Specimen Entries chart inside the front cover, and all features are fully ex-plained in The Plán of This Dictionary, pp. xviii to xxiii.In keeping with the policy of Funk & Wagnalls, and of American lexicography in generál for three fourths of a century, we have chosen to include geographical, biographical, mythological, and other kinds of informa-tional entries in our vocabulary. All entries have been included in the single A-Z listing for ease of reference.We continue to follow two policies originated by Dr. I. K. Funk and widely adopted by other publishers. These are the ordering of senses according to semantic frequency, and the location of etymologies at the end rather than at the beginning of the entry. As an aid in determining frequency of occurrence we have used A Semantic Count of English Words by Irving Lorge and Edward L. Thorndike, and are grateful to the Institute of Educational Research, Teachers College, Columbia University, for making this unique study available to us.We have abandoned our earlier policy of spelling reform because we do not regard a dictionary as a proper instrument of advocacy in such matters. The spellings we record here are those established by use.While all the features, systems, and editorial styles of the dictionary are well devised and efficient, we are most proud of five particular virtues.First, we have incorporated more material on dis-puted points of grammatical usage than any other desk dictionary contains. Our usage notes, preceded by a large black diamond indicator, would constitute an excellent small book, a guide to usage in the cases where a guide is most often needed. The majority of the notes are based upon Professor Margaret Bryant's Current American Usage, the most comprehensive and authoritative recent book on the subject.Second, our synonym discriminations, written by the late Geoffrey Mott-Smith and edited by Professor S. I. Hayakawa, are the most accurate, elegant, and helpful of their kind.Third, the supervisory board of this dictionary, com-prising four of the most distinguished linguistic author-ities of the nation, actually served as editors reading and revising the material, and were not confined to a merely honorary or nominal function.Fourth, this dictionary is the first of its kind to give a considerable place to Canadian English. Not only have we included an essay on that subject in our pre-liminaries, but we have entered over 500 specifically Canadian terms and senses. These represent the re-markably limited area where the vocabularies of Canadian and American English do not coincide. Most of the terms and senses that we have labeled U.S. are alsó current in Canada.Fifth, our scrupulous use of labels and cross-references gives a more accurate representation of the English language as a complex and delicately differentiated organic system than any other desk dictionary has attempted. By their nature, dictionaries are forced to treat many things in isolation which the editors know can be exactly treated only in context or combination. The recording of the pronunciation of isolated words is the best example of this limitation. At the same time, work on a dictionary is probably the most direct way of knowing the multiple interconnections and inter-dependencies among lexical items. One has the feeling of working with an enormous and extremely sensitive spider web: if you touch it in one place it jiggles in a hundred others. We have attempted to give a just notion of the delicacy of the web by our system of re-strictive labels, and of its interconnections by our system of cross-references. Both are of a refinement and elaboration never before achieved in a desk dictionary.