Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary
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''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary'' is a large American
dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged Alphabetical order, alphabetically (or by Semitic root, consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical-and-stroke sorting, radical an ...
, first published in 1966 as ''The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: The Unabridged Edition''. Edited by Editor-in-chief Jess Stein, it contained 315,000 entries in 2256 pages, as well as 2400 illustrations. The
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version in 1994 also included 120,000 spoken pronunciations.


History

The
Random House Random House is an imprint and publishing group of Penguin Random House. Founded in 1927 by businessmen Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer as an imprint of Modern Library, it quickly overtook Modern Library as the parent imprint. Over the foll ...
publishing company entered the
reference book A reference work is a document, such as a Academic publishing#Scholarly paper, paper, book or periodical literature, periodical (or their electronic publishing, electronic equivalents), to which one can refer for information. The information ...
market after World War II. They acquired rights to the ''
Century Dictionary ''The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia'' is one of the largest encyclopedic dictionaries of the English language. It was compared favorably with the ''Oxford English Dictionary,'' and frequently consulted for more factual information than woul ...
'' and the ''
Dictionary of American English ''A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles'' (''DAE'') is a dictionary of terms appearing in English in the United States that was published in four volumes from 1938 to 1944 by the University of Chicago Press. Intended to pick u ...
'', both out of print. Their first dictionary was
Clarence Barnhart Clarence Lewis Barnhart (1900–1993) was an American lexicographer best known for editing the ''Thorndike-Barnhart'' series of graded dictionaries, published by Scott Foresman & Co. which were based on word lists and concepts of definition deve ...
's '' American College Dictionary'', published in 1947, and based primarily on ''The New Century Dictionary'', an abridgment of the ''Century''. In the late 1950s, it was decided to publish an expansion of the '' American College Dictionary'', which had been modestly updated with each reprinting since its publication. Under editors Jess Stein and Laurence Urdang, they augmented the ''American College Dictionary'' with large numbers of entries in all fields, primarily proper names, and published it in 1966 as ''The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: The Unabridged Edition''. It was the first dictionary to use computers in its compilation and
typesetting Typesetting is the composition of text for publication, display, or distribution by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or '' glyphs'' in digital systems representing '' characters'' (letters and other ...
. The dataset for compiling the dictionary contained a 25,000,000-word corpus. In his preface to the 1966 edition, Stein wrote (p. vi) that the ''Random House Dictionary'' steers "a linguistically sound middle course" between the "lexicographer's Scylla and Charybdis: should the dictionary be an authoritarian guide to 'correct' English or should it be so antiseptically free of comment that it may defeat the user by providing him with no guidance at all?" In 1982 Random House published The Random House ProofReader, a computer
spell checker In software, a spell checker (or spelling checker or spell check) is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic ...
based on its dictionary. An expanded second edition of the printed dictionary, edited by Stuart Berg Flexner, appeared in 1987, revised in 1993. This edition adopted the ''Merriam-Webster Collegiate'' practice of adding dates for the entry of words into the language. Unlike the ''Collegiate'', which cited the date of the first known citation, ''Random House'' indicated a range of dates. For example, where the ''Collegiate'' gave 1676, ''Random House'' might offer 1670–80. This second edition was described as permissive by in the ''Washington Post''. Random House incorporated the name ''Webster's'' into the dictionary's title after an appeals court overturned an injunction awarded to
Merriam Webster Merriam-Webster, Incorporated is an American company that publishes reference books and is mostly known for its dictionaries. It is the oldest dictionary publisher in the United States. In 1831, George and Charles Merriam founded the compa ...
restricting the name's use. The name ''Random House Webster's'' is now used on many Random House publications. In 2001, Random House published its ''Webster's Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language'', based on the Second Edition of the ''Random House Dictionary of the English Language''. Versions of the dictionary have been published under other names, including ''Webster's New Universal Dictionary'' (which was previously the name of an entirely different dictionary), ''Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary'', and ''Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language''. '' Dictionary.com''s online dictionary bases its proprietary content on the ''Random House'' unabridged version.


See also

*
WordGenius WordGenius is a system for publishing dictionaries and reference books electronically, based on technology from Eurofield Information Systems. The Unabridged and College versions of the '' Random House Dictionary'' known as ''Random House Webster ...


References


External links


Finding aid to the Random House dictionary records at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Random House Dictionary Of The English Language 1966 non-fiction books English dictionaries Random House books