Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged I-III.

Előszó

Webster's Third New International Dictionary is a completely new work, redesigned, restyled, and reset. Every line of it is new. This latest unabridged Merriam-Webster is the eighth in a series which has its begin-ning in Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828. On Webster's death in 1843 the unsold copies and publishing rights of his dictionary were acquired by George and Charles Merriam, who in 1847 brought out a revision edited by Noah Webster's son-in-law, Professor Chauncey A. Goodrich of Yale College. The 1847 edition became the first Merriam-Webster unabridged dictionary*. G. C. Merriam Company now offers Webster's Third New International Dictionary to the English* speaking world as a prime linguistic aid to interpreting the culture and civilization of today, as the first edition served the America of 1828.
As the number of students in school and college jumps to ever-increasing heights, the quantity of printed niatter necessary to their education increases too. Not only are more words used more often with these increases; words must be used more economically and more efficiently both in school and out. More and more do people undertaking a new job, practicing a new hobby, or developing a new interest turn to how-to pamphlets, manuals, and books for both elementary instruction and advanced guidance. Where formerly they had time to learn by doing, they now need to begin by reading and understanding what has been recorded. A quiek grasp of the meanings of words becomes necessary if one is to be successful. A dictionary opens the way to both formai learning and to the daily self-instruction that modern living requires. It is the key alsó to the daily newspaper and to a vast number of other periodicals that demand our attention. This edition has been prepared with a constant regard for the needs of the high school and college student, the technician, and the periodical reader, as well as of the scholar and professional. It undertakes to provide for the changes in public interest in all classes of words as manifested by what people want to read, discuss, and study. The dictionary more than ever is the indispensable instrument of understanding and progress.
G. C. Merriam Company have produced this Third New International at a cost of over $3,500,000. The budgetary and technical planning underlying its production has been directed and coordinated since 1953 by the Company's president, Mr. Gordon J. Gallan. His activity, understanding, and cooperation have contributed indispensably to its editorial comple-tion and have made possible the maintenance of a Merriam-Webster perma-nent office staff constituted according to need. This staff is in effect a faculty which specializes in different branches of knowledge much as a small college faculty does. Listed among the resident editors are a mathematiciaTi, a physicist, a chemist, a botanist, a biologist, a philosopher, a political scien-tist, a comparative religionist, a classicist, a histórián, and a librarian as well as philologists, linguists, etymologists, and phoneticians whose specialty is the English language itself. Their academic affiliations and their degrees can be seen one by one in the "Merriam-Webster Editorial Staff" that follows this preface. Besides the office staff over two hundred other scholars and specialists have served as outside consultants in supplementary reviewing, revising, and submitting new definitions in subjects in which they are authorities. The rangé and experience of this special knowledge appear in the listing of their names alphabetically after the editorial staff.
In conformity with the principle that a definition, to be adequate, must be written only after an analysis of usage, the definitions in this edition are based chiefly on examples of usage collected since publication of the pre-ceding edition. Members of the editorial staff began in 1936 a systematic reading of books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, catalogs, and learned journals. By the time of going to press the collection contained just under 4,500,000 such new examples of recorded usage, to be added to more than 1,665,000 citations already in the files for previous editions. Further, the citations in the indispensable many-volume Oxjord English Dictionary, the new citations in Sir William Craigie's four-volume Dictionary of American English and Mitford M. Mathews' two-volume Dictionary oj Americanisms, neither of which was available to the editors of the preceding edition, and the uncounted citations in dozens of concordances to the Bible and to works of English and American writers and in numerous books of quotations push the citation background for the definitions in this dictionary to over ten millión. This figure does not include freely consulted text matter in the office library of reference books. Nor does it include thousands of textbooks in the priváté and academic libraries of the editors and consultants, nor books consulted in the Springfield City Library whose librarians have generously given the editorial staff ready and frequent access to its large and valuable word-hoard.

Vissza