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 definitions, 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 100,00C vocabulary entries, selected on the basis of how frequently they occur in contemporary newspapers, magazines, and general books of fiction and nonfiction. This is an age oi 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, oi perhaps because of, television more people are reading more than ever before. As oui interests broaden, our vocabularies must stretch to take up the new slack. We piel up our newspapers and read of the desegregation of schools, the implications of atdo-mation, the popularity of the mambo, 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, anc 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 usag( of any of these words or phrases will turn to a dictionary for help. He can reasonablj expect to find all of these in a modern dictionary, and he will, of course, find them ir his New World. The lexicographical staff of the New World Dictionaries set out to compile a refer ence work that would include all the information that the general user might hope t( find in a handy-sized desk dictionary. It was decided, for example, that the present day popular interest in language could be served by including brief etymologies. Thesi little histories of the origin and development of words often help one to a clearer under standing of the current meanings of these words. Those who are interested in mor( detailed etymologies, carrying words back to their earliest Indo-European roots, cai find them in the College Edition of the New World. It was also decided to include i limited number of biographical and geographical entries, the more important histórica figures and places that one would most often meet up with in his general reading These entries, along with the most common abbreviations and such foreign words an( phrases as are often used in an English context, have been entered as a convenienci in the single alphabetical listing of the dictionary proper. Population figures are con servative and have been carefully checked with authoritative sources. UnoiBcia estimates of population figures have been avoided; only the latest official counts o: estimates available were considered reliable. All cities of the United States with > 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 Bibli or in other standard works of literature have been included. Similarly, such specialize'