The American Heritage Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary [antikvár]

prefaceThe English language was born fifteen hundred years ago when the Saxon invaders of the Roman province of Britain started raising children in their new homeland. Children are the inventors of language. In the earhest centuries of its existence, English remained almost identical with the Saxon dialects spoken by the settlers' forebears in what is now Germany and Denmark, across the North Sea. From A.D. 793 to 1066, England was invaded again and again by Norsemen, and for two centuries much of northern Britain was under Danish rule. Our language has retained a slightly Scandinavian flavor ever since. Following the Conquest of 1066, by French-speaking Normans, English as we know it came into being, a peculiar Germanic tongue whose vocabulary is more than two-thirds French in origin. With the Age of Exploration came the British Empire (a term coined by Queen Elizabeth's astrologer John Dee) and the language expanded in many different directions at once. Thousands of new words for new concepts and things flowed in from Latin and Greek. The vocabularies of politics, commerce, and the arts soaked up words from French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and other languages. At the same time, English-speaking settlers put down roots in new countries all over the globe, and within a few generations there were as many new dialects of English as there were British colonies. By the end of the 20th century. World English has already become the most important language on the planet, and North American its leading dialect. The day is at hand when everyone on earth will know at least some North American, regardless of his or her home language.A language serving so many different communities and fields represents a body of information too vast for any one person to master. Hence the need for dictionaries. Everybody needs one nowadays. It was established some years ago that there are more dictionaries than television sets in North America. The basic purpose served by a dictionary is to furnish a word's correct spelling and syllabication, meaning, and pronunciation. In a language as vast as World English, spellings, meanings, and pronunciations fluctuate almost as rapidly as the ebb and flow of the events they mirror. As North American English becomes Number One in science, industry, and politics worldwide, people are coming to expect the dictionary to provide authoritative information about not only words but the objects and ideas they denote. This has led to a need for a new type of dictionary, one that provides all that traditional dictionaries give, and then some. In the present work we have accounted for more than 200,000 meanings coming from all of the many varieties of English, with special emphasis on North American but extensive coverage of all the rest. We continued to add important new words to the text up until the last days before the book went to press. In addition to such traditional features as word origins, usage notes, illustrative quotations, and synonyms, we have added the most extensive biographical and geographic coverage ever provided in a dictionary, together with several hundred illustrated feature articles, and 2,300 four-color pictures. Each of the pictures was chosen for its information value, the better to identify, visualize, or understand the item in question.There is another feature that, although intangible, looms larger than all of the foregoing put together, and that is the element of due proportion and measure that we have brought to the writing of this book. Dictionary writing, like medicine, is partly a science, mostly an art. Estimates vary as to the actual number of words present in the language at any given time. Some authorities fix this at around 340,000 live items. Yet many of these are so trivial or so ephemeral that they do not really belong in a reference book. The dictionary writer, in attempting to meet the need for all-round usefulness, must rely heavily on intuition, judgment, guesswork. In a dictionary with additional encyclopedic material, the editor has to make strong-minded choices, to include or to exclude, every step of the way. At the same time, by our choice of quotations as well as our own use of English in the articles, definitions, and captions you will read in the following pages, we have tried to keep the focus on the book's highest object, which is the thing of rare beauty that is our language. According to the Book of Proverbs, "A word fitly spoken is Uke apples of gold in a setting of silver." It is to help our readers find many such words that we offer the present book.The Editor