Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary
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Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary
''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 315,000 entries in 2256 pages, as well as 2400 illustrations. The CD-ROM version in 1994 also included 120,000 spoken pronunciations. History The Random House publishing company entered the reference book market after World War II. They acquired rights to the ''Century Dictionary'' and the ''Dictionary of American English'', both out of print. Their first dictionary was Clarence Barnhart'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 Urdan ...
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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 symbols).Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 23 December 2009Dictionary.reference.com/ref> Stored types are retrieved and ordered according to a language's orthography for visual display. Typesetting requires one or more fonts (which are widely but erroneously confused with and substituted for typefaces). One significant effect of typesetting was that authorship of works could be spotted more easily, making it difficult for copiers who have not gained permission. Pre-digital era Manual typesetting During much of the letterpress era, movable type was composed by hand for each page by workers called compositors. A tray with many dividers, called a case, contained cast metal '' sorts'', each with a single letter or symbol, bu ...
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1966 Non-fiction Books
Events January * January 1 – In a coup, Colonel Jean-Bédel Bokassa takes over as military ruler of the Central African Republic, ousting President David Dacko. * January 3 – 1966 Upper Voltan coup d'état: President Maurice Yaméogo is deposed by a military coup in the Republic of Upper Volta (modern-day Burkina Faso). * January 10 ** Pakistani–Indian peace negotiations end successfully with the signing of the Tashkent Declaration, a day before the sudden death of Indian prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri. ** Georgia House of Representatives, The House of Representatives of the US state of Georgia refuses to allow African-American representative Julian Bond to take his seat, because of his anti-war stance. * January 15 – 1966 Nigerian coup d'état: A bloody military coup is staged in Nigeria, deposing the civilian government and resulting in the death of Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. * January 17 ** The Nigerian coup is overturned by another faction of the ...
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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's Unabridged Dictionary'', and the '' Macquarie Dictionary of Australian English'' have been published using the technology, along with a thesaurus and spell checker for Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec .... WordGenius takes special keywords to be able to return multiple possible matches for words. This also applies to definitions. References {{reflist Electronic publishing ...
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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 and stroke for Logogram, logographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, pronunciations, Bilingual dictionary, translation, etc.Webster's New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition, 2002 It is a Lexicography, lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among the data. A broad distinction is made between general and specialized dictionaries. Specialized dictionaries include words in specialist fields, rather than a comprehensive range of words in the language. Lexical items that describe concepts in specific fields are usually called terms instead of words, although there is no consensus whether lexicology and terminology are two different fields of study. In theory, general dictionarie ...
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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 company as G & C Merriam Co. in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1843, after Noah Webster died, the company bought the rights to '' An American Dictionary of the English Language'' from Webster's estate. All Merriam-Webster dictionaries trace their lineage to this source. In 1964, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., acquired Merriam-Webster, Inc., as a subsidiary. The company adopted its current name, Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, in 1982. History 19th century In 1806, Webster published his first dictionary, ''A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language''. The following year, in 1807, Webster began two consecutive decades of intensive work to expand his publication into a fully comprehensive dictionary, ''An American Dictionary of the En ...
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Stuart Berg Flexner
Stuart Berg Flexner (1928–1990) was a lexicographer, editor and author, noted for his books on the origins of American words and expressions, including ''I Hear America Talking'' and ''Listening to America''; as co-editor of the '' Dictionary of American Slang'' and as chief editor of the ''Random House Dictionary ''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 ..., Second Edition''. Personal life Flexner was the son of clothing retailer David Flexner and Gertrude, née Berg.The Scribner Encyclopaedia of American Lives: 1986-1990, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson, Karen Markoe, Arnie Markoe, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998, p. 294 He was twice married, first to Miriam Bogen and then to Doris Louise Hurcomb. Bibliography * ''How to Increase Your Word Power'' (1971) * ''Family Word Finder: A New ...
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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 dictionary, or search engine. Design A basic spell checker carries out the following processes: * It scans the text and extracts the words contained in it. * It then compares each word with a known list of correctly spelled words (i.e. a dictionary). This might contain just a list of words, or it might also contain additional information, such as hyphenation points or lexical and grammatical attributes. * An additional step is a language-dependent algorithm for handling morphology. Even for a lightly inflected language like English, the spell checker will need to consider different forms of the same word, such as plurals, verbal forms, contractions, and possessives. For many other languages, such as those featuring agglutination and ...
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Scylla And Charybdis
In Greek mythology, Scylla ( ; , ) is a legendary, man-eating monster that lives on one side of a narrow channel of water, opposite her counterpart, the sea-swallowing monster Charybdis. The two sides of the strait are within an arrow's range of each other—so close that sailors attempting to avoid the whirlpools of Charybdis would pass dangerously close to Scylla and vice versa. Scylla is first attested in Homer's ''Odyssey'', where Odysseus and his crew encounter her and Charybdis on their travels. Later myth provides an origin story as a beautiful nymph who gets turned into a monster. Book Three of Virgil's ''Aeneid'' associates the strait where Scylla dwells with the Strait of Messina between Calabria, a region of Southern Italy, and Sicily. The coastal town of Scilla in Calabria takes its name from the mythological figure of Scylla and it is said to be the home of the nymph. The idiom " between Scylla and Charybdis" has come to mean being forced to choose between two sim ...
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Laurence Urdang
Laurence Urdang (March 21, 1927 – August 21, 2008) was a lexicographer, editor and author noted for first computerising the unabridged ''Random House Dictionary of the English Language'', published in 1966. The dataset for the dictionary contained a 25,000,000-word corpus. He was also the founding editor of '' Verbatim'', a quarterly newsletter on language. Urdang was born in Manhattan and graduated from the Fieldston School in The Bronx. He then entered the Naval Reserve at the end of World War II. Educated at Columbia University (where he restricted himself to Russian, German, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and Polish), Urdang was a linguistics lecturer at New York University from 1956 to 1961. Although he never wrote the dissertation that would have completed his graduate degree, the ''Random House Dictionary'' filled the void amply: "He always said he considered the Random House dictionary his dissertation," said Nicole Urdang.Quoted in Weber 2008. Urdang made his deb ...
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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 and stroke for Logogram, logographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, pronunciations, Bilingual dictionary, translation, etc.Webster's New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition, 2002 It is a Lexicography, lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among the data. A broad distinction is made between general and specialized dictionaries. Specialized dictionaries include words in specialist fields, rather than a comprehensive range of words in the language. Lexical items that describe concepts in specific fields are usually called terms instead of words, although there is no consensus whether lexicology and terminology are two different fields of study. In theory, general dictionarie ...
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Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut ( ; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American author known for his Satire, satirical and darkly humorous novels. His published work includes fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works over fifty-plus years; further works have been published since his death. Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University, but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the United States Army, U.S. Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Mellon University, Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was prisoner of war, interned in Dresden, where he survived the Bombing of Dresden in World War II, Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox ...
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