Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language [antikvár]

FOREWORD This Concise Edition of Webster's New World Dictionary is the inevitable result of the warm reception given its predecessor, the College Edition. The approval granted that work by educators and students suggested that its special lexicographical features might well be applied to a more compact dictionary. The editors are convinced that there are many professional and business people, secondary-school students, office workers, new speakers of English, and others who want a comprehensive and contemporary dictionary but who have less need for the extensive etymologies, highly technical terms, many rare and obsolete senses, and certain other features found in the College Edition. The editors are equally convinced that complete and understandable clefinitions, realistic pronunciations, and an adequate word stock are essentials in any dictionary. The result of these convictions is the Concise Edition, a dictionary of over 100,000 vocabulary entries, selected on the basis of how frequently they occur in contemporary newspapers, magazines, and generál books of fiction and nonfiction. This is an age of constantly expanding horizons. More words are being used in writing about more subjects than ever before. And librarians and publishers assure us that in spite of, or perhaps because of, television more people are reading more than ever before. As our interests broaden, our vocabularies must stretch to take up the new slack. We pick up our newspapers and read of the desegregation of schools, the implications of autómat ion, the popularity of the mambó, the discovery of einsteinium and fermium, and the celebration of Veterans' Day. Moreover, we daily encounter in our reading and social conversation such compounds and phrases as tree lawn, round robin, elbow grease, sell like hot cakes, from hand to mouth, read between the lines, make sheep's eyes at, and other idiomatic expressions that mean more than the sums of their individual words. The reader or listener who feels at all uncertain about the meanings or spelling or usage of any of these words or phrases will turn to a dictionary for help. He can reasonably expect to find all of these in a modern dictionary, and he will, of course, find them in his New World. The lexicographical staff of the New World Dictionaries set out to compile a reference work that would include all the information that the generál user might hope to find in a handy-sized clesk dictionary. It was decided, for example, that the presentday popular interest in language could be served by including brief etymologies. These little histories of the origin and development of words often help one to a clearer understanciing of the current meanings of these words. Those who are interestel in more detailed etymologies, carrving words back to their earliest Indo-European roots, can find them in the College Edition of the Neio World. It was alsó decided to include a limited number of biographical and geographical entries, the more important historical figures and places that one would most often meet up with in his generál reading. These entries, along with the most common abbreviations and such foreign words and phrases as are often used in an English context, have been entered as a convenience in the single alphabetical listing of the dictionary proper. Population figures are conservative and have been carefully cliecked with authoritative sources. Unofficial estimates of population figures have been avoicled; only the latest official counts or estimates available were considered reliable. All cities of the United States with a population of 60,000 or more according to the 1960 census have been entered. Those obsolete and archaic terms and senses that are frequently found in the Bible or in other standard works of literature have been included. Similarly, such specialized T7-