''The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language'' (''AHD'') is an

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

dictionary of English published by Boston publisher

Houghton Mifflin The asterisk ( ), from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , ''asteriskos'', "little star", is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star. Computer scientists and mathematicians often voc ...

, the first edition of which appeared in 1969. Its creation was spurred by the controversy over the perceived permissiveness of the ''

Webster's Third New International Dictionary ''Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged'' (commonly known as ''Webster's Third'', or ''W3'') was published in September 1961. It was edited by Philip Babcock Gove and a team of lexicographers who spent 757 ...

''. The third edition included over 350,000 entries and meanings.

History

James Parton (1912–2001) was a grandson of the English-born American biographer

James Parton James Parton (February 9, 1822 – October 17, 1891) was an English-born American biographer who wrote books on the lives of Horace Greeley, Aaron Burr, Andrew Jackson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Voltaire, and contributed three bio ...

(1822–1891). He was the founder, publisher and co-owner of the magazines ''

American Heritage American Heritage may refer to: * ''American Heritage'' (magazine) * '' The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language'' * American Heritage Rivers * American Heritage School (disambiguation) See also * National Register of Historic Pla ...

'' and ''

Horizon The horizon is the apparent line that separates the surface of a celestial body from its sky when viewed from the perspective of an observer on or near the surface of the relevant body. This line divides all viewing directions based on whether i ...

'', and was appalled by the permissiveness of ''Webster's Third'', published in 1961. (Webster's Third presented all entries without labeling them correct or incorrect.) Parton tried to buy the G. and C. Merriam Company so that he could undo the changes. When that failed, he contracted with Houghton to publish a new dictionary. The ''AHD'' was edited by William Morris and relied on a usage panel of 105 writers, speakers, and eminent persons chosen for their well-known conservatism in the use of language. However, Morris made inconsistent use of the panels, often ignoring their advice and inserting his own opinions.

Linguistics

The ''AHD'' broke ground among dictionaries by using

corpus linguistics Corpus linguistics is the study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus (plural ''corpora''), its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora ...

for compiling word frequencies and other information. It took the innovative step of combining '' prescriptive'' information (how language should be used) and '' descriptive'' information (how it actually is used). The descriptive information was derived from actual texts. Citations were based on a million-word, three-line

citation database A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century Hebre ...

prepared by

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

linguist Henry Kučera.

Usage panel

For expert consultation on words or constructions whose usage was controversial or problematic, the American Heritage Dictionary relied on the advice of a usage panel. In its final form, the panel comprised nearly 200 prominent members of professions whose work demanded sensitivity to language. Former members of the usage panel include novelists (

Isaac Asimov yi, יצחק אזימאװ , birth_date = , birth_place = Petrovichi, Russian SFSR , spouse = , relatives = , children = 2 , death_date = , death_place = Manhattan, New York City, U.S. , nationality = Russian (1920–1922)Soviet (192 ...

Barbara Kingsolver Barbara Kingsolver (born April 8, 1955) is an American novelist, essayist and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood. Kingsolver earned degrees in biology at DePauw University and the Univers ...

, David Foster Wallace and Eudora Welty), poets ( Rita Dove, Galway Kinnell, Mary Oliver and Robert Pinsky), playwrights ( Terrence McNally and

Marsha Norman Marsha Norman (born September 21, 1947) is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. She received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play '' 'night, Mother''. She wrote the book and lyrics for such Broadway musicals as '' T ...

), journalists ( Liane Hansen and Susan Stamberg), literary critics ( Harold Bloom), columnists and commentators ( William F. Buckley, Jr. and Robert J. Samuelson), linguists and cognitive scientists (

Anne Curzan Anne Curzan is a professor of English at the University of Michigan since 2012 and dean of its College of Literature, Science, and the Arts since 2019. Biography Curzan received a bachelor of arts in linguistics ''summa cum laude'' from Yale Un ...

, Steven Pinker and Calvert Watkins) and humorists (

Garrison Keillor Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor (; born August 7, 1942) is an American author, singer, humorist, voice actor, and radio personality. He created the Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) show ''A Prairie Home Companion'' (called ''Garrison Keillor's Radi ...

, David Sedaris and

Alison Bechdel Alison Bechdel ( ; born September 10, 1960) is an American cartoonist. Originally known for the long-running comic strip ''Dykes to Watch Out For'', she came to critical and commercial success in 2006 with her graphic memoir ''Fun Home'', which ...

). Pinker, author of the

style guide A style guide or manual of style is a set of standards for the writing, formatting, and design of documents. It is often called a style sheet, although that term also has multiple other meanings. The standards can be applied either for gene ...

'' The Sense of Style'', was its final chair. The members of the panel were sent regular ballots asking about matters of usage; the completed ballots were returned and tabulated, and the results formed the basis for special usage notes appended to the relevant dictionary entries. In many cases, these notes not only reported the percentage of panelists who considered a given usage or construction to be acceptable, but would also report the results from balloting of the same question in past decades, to give a clearer sense of how the language changes over time. Houghton Mifflin dissolved the usage panel on February 1, 2018, citing the decline in demand for print dictionaries.

Illustrations

The ''AHD'' is also somewhat innovative in its liberal use of photographic illustrations, which at the time was highly unusual for general reference dictionaries, many of which went largely or completely unillustrated. It also has an unusually large number of biographical entries for notable persons.

First edition

The first edition appeared in 1969, highly praised for its

Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Du ...

etymologies Etymology () The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) – p. 633 "Etymology /ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/ the study of the class in words and the way their meanings have changed throughout time". is the study of the history of the form of words a ...

. In addition to the normally expected etymologies, which for instance trace the word ''ambiguous'' to a

Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo ...

root In vascular plants, the roots are the organs of a plant that are modified to provide anchorage for the plant and take in water and nutrients into the plant body, which allows plants to grow taller and faster. They are most often below the su ...

''ag-'', meaning "to drive," the appendices included a seven-page article by Professor Calvert Watkins entitled "Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans" and "Indo-European Roots", 46 pages of entries that are each organized around one of some thousand Proto-Indo-European roots and the English words of the ''AHD'' that are understood to have evolved from them. These entries might be called "reverse etymologies": the ''ag-'' entry there, for instance, lists 49 terms derived from it, words as diverse as ''agent'', ''essay'', ''purge'', ''stratagem'', ''ambassador'', ''axiom'', and ''pellagra'', along with information about varying routes through intermediate transformations on the way to the contemporary words. A compacted ''American Heritage College Dictionary'' was first released in 1974.

Second and later editions

The first edition's concise successor, ''The American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition'' was published in 1982 (without a larger-format version). It omitted the

etymologies, but they were reintroduced in the third full edition, published in 1992. The third edition was also a departure for the publisher because it was developed in a database, which facilitated the use of the linguistic data for other applications, such as electronic dictionaries. The fourth edition (2000, reissued in 2006) added an appendix of

Semitic language The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigrant ...

etymological roots, and included color illustrations, and was also available with a CD-ROM edition in some versions. This revision was larger than a typical desk dictionary but smaller than ''

'' or the unabridged ''

Random House Dictionary of the English Language ''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary'' is a large American dictionary, 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 315,0 ...

''. A lower-priced college edition, also the fourth, was issued in black-and-white printing and with fewer illustrations, in 2002 (reprinted in 2007 and 2010). The fifth and most recent full edition was published in November 2011, with new printings in 2012, 2016, and a 50th Anniversary Printing in 2018, which the publisher states is a "comprehensive update" of the 2011 edition, containing "... ousands of revisions to definitions and etymologies, 150 new words and senses, and new usage advice ...." The various printings of the 5th edition are available in hardcover and, with reduced print size and smaller page count, trade paperback form. The 5th edition dropped several of the supplementary features of the fourth edition, and is not available with a disc-based electronic version. The university-student version was renamed ''The American Heritage College Writer's Dictionary'' in 2013, and stripped of biographical and geographical entries to make room for more vocabulary while simultaneously reducing the number of pages compared to the fourth college edition. The ''AHD'' inserts minor revisions (such as a biographical entry, with photograph, for each newly elected U.S. president) in successive printings of any given edition. Supporting volumes have been issued, including ''The American Heritage Book of English Usage'', ''The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots'', ''The American Heritage

Abbreviation An abbreviation (from Latin ''brevis'', meaning ''short'') is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method. It may consist of a group of letters or words taken from the full version of the word or phrase; for example, the word ''abbrevia ...

s Dictionary'', ''The American Heritage Dictionary of

Idiom An idiom is a phrase or expression that typically presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase; but some phrases become figurative idioms while retaining the literal meaning of the phrase. Categorized as formulaic language ...

s'', ''The American Heritage Thesaurus'' in various sizes; usage dictionaries of special vocabulary such as ''The American Heritage Science Dictionary'', ''The American Heritage Medical Dictionary'' and ''The American Heritage Dictionary of Business Terms''; plus special dictionary editions for children, high-school students, and English-language learners. The ''American Heritage'' brand is also used for a series of American history books.

References

External links

''American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language'' online

The ''American Heritage Dictionary'' Software
{{DEFAULTSORT:American Heritage Dictionary Of The English Language 1969 non-fiction books English dictionaries Works about American English