Webster's New World College Dictionary - CD-vel [antikvár]

FOREWORDIn 1941, the World Publishing Company, founded in the early 1900s in Cleveland, Ohio, hired a staff of scholars to create a new dictionary. Determined to break with the conservatism that existed in contemporary reference editing, this team of lexicographers set out to produce a mid-20th-century dictionary that would accurately reflect the era and its language. Led by chief editors David B. Guralnik and Joseph H. Friend, their goal was to create a completely new kind of dictionary built on a foundation of contemporary linguistics, psychology, and allied sciences.In contrast to other leading dictionaries of that time, which were stifily formal and authoritarian, this new work was to be a more friendly, open guide that showed how language is actually used. The editors sought to record the relaxed pronunciations used in ordinary conversation rather than those of the synthetic "platform speech" traditionally recorded in other dictionaries. They also established an easily understood phonemic system for transcribing pronunciations, and, eventually, expanded etymologies to include Indo-European bases and the cognate relationships of words within the language. The most important innovation, however, was in the style of the definitions, which used 20th-century language in a manner that conveyed meaning with sureness, clarity, and ease.Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language was ultimately published in September 1951 in a two-volume encyclopedic edition. A single-volume college edition followed in 1953. Reviews of the work were enthusiastic in their praise. The December 1951 issue of Library Journal hailed the work as a "dictionary that marks a great advance in American lexicography."In 1970, a completely revised Second College Edition was published. It was the first dictionary to identify all Americanismsthose terms and usages that first appeared in the United States. It was also the first to give etymologies of American place names.The value of the dictionary's editorial innovations did not go unnoticed. In 1975, the New York Times announced it was replacing the dic-tionary it had used for decades with the Second College Edition of Webster's New World Dictionary as its first reference and as the basis for its forthcoming Manual of Style and Usage. The next year, both the Associated Press and United Press International adopted the dictionary and based their style manuals on it as well. They cited the frequency and thoroughness of updates, the reliability of the information, and the clarity of the definitions as reasons for choosing the work. Subsequently, most leading U.S. newspapers selected the Webster's New World Dictionary as their dictionary of first choice. In 1970, the dictionary was chosen by the American Printing House for the Blind, in conjunction with the Library of Congress, as the first dictionary of its scope to be embossed in Braille in its entirety; the resulting work comprised 72 large volumes.The Third College Edition was launched in 1988. By 1991,40 years after the original dictionary was published, more than 85 million Webster's New World Dictionaries, in various editions, had been printed.The present work, the Fourth College Edition, was published in July 1999. It is the result of more than four years of concentrated editorial effort and of half as much time again spent in long-range planning. It retains the many acclaimed virtues of the Webster's New World tradition while bolstering the coverage of the rapidly growing lexicon of contemporary English and introducing important and innovative lexicographic features.As society changes, adapting to technological innovation and cultural shifts, language changes along with it. New words are coined, existing words take on new meanings, pronunciations change, words shift in toneall part of the continuing process by which a language maintains its vigor and usefulness. The editorial staff of Webster's New World conducts a wide-reaching program of language monitoring to document such change. Linguistic evidence is collected on a daily basis in the form of citations of words and expressions used in print and speech; the program collects several thousand new citations every month. It is these citations which have