A New Standard Dictionary

Abstract

IT has been said that “a dictionary of language should contain all the words which may be reasonably looked for in it, so arranged as to be readily and surely found, and so explained as to make their meaning, and if possible their use, clear to those who have a competent knowledge of the language or languages in which the explanations are given.” In other words, a dictionary should be an “inventory of language,” and this being so, it constitutes an index to the state of knowledge at any epoch. Not so very many years ago it was held that words belonging to sciences and the arts should be omitted from dictionaries. The French Academy at first went so far as to reject all technical terms from their dictionary, though they afterwards decided to admit them, and, when the Philological Society projected their dictionary in 1856, they resolved to accept all English words except “such as are devoted to purely scientific subjects, as treatises on electricity, mathematics, &c.” But time has changed all that. No which such a sin of omission is committed deserves the name of a dictionary.

A Standard Dictionary of the English Language.

Vol. i. (New York: Funk and Wagnall's Company, 1893).