The Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English [antikvár]

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION This book is nominally an abridgement of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, but has in fact cost its compilers more labour, partly because the larger book was found not to be easily squeezable, and partly owing to changes in method unconnected with mere reduction of quantity. The one merit, however, that they feel entitled to claim for the C.O.D. has been preserved to the best of their power in the abridgement—that is, they have kept to the principle that a dictionary is a book of diction, concerned primarily with words or phrases as such, and not, except so far as is needed to ensure their right treatment in speech, with the things those words and phrases stand for. This principle, while it absolves the dictionary-maker from cumbering his pages with cyclopaedic information, demands on the other hand that he should devote much more space than that so saved to the task of making clear the idiomatic usage of words. The bad dictionary, on a word that has half a dozen distinct meanings, parades by way of definition half a dozen synonyms, each, of them probably possessed of several senses besides the one desired, and fails to add the qualifications and illustrations that would show the presumably ignorant reader how far each synonym is coextensive with his word, and what is the context to which one or other is the more appropriate. To avoid this vice has been the chief aim of the C.O.D. and of this abridgement alike ; but the smaller the scale of the book, the more difficult becomes the task. Among the changes of method referred to above, three may be indicated.