The New Oxford American Dictionary (review)

REVIEWS The New Oxford American Dictionary. Ed. Elizabeth J. Jewell, Frank Abate, and others. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xl + 2023. $50.00 U.S. weighty . . . [core sense] weighing a great deal; heavy . . . [subsense ] of great seriousness and importance. tome ... a book, esp. a large, heavy, scholarly one: a weighty tome. t: ' he New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) is a weighty tome, even by the book's own definitions. Tipping the scale at some 9 pounds, NOAD clearly meets its core sense definition for weighty (as applied to a dictionary); but more significant is the fact that it also satisfies the subsense of the same word — it is serious and important. Weighty dictionaries have become the fashion of late. Between the long-established categories of the smaller desk or college dictionary and the larger "unabridged," that is, very large, dictionary like Webster's Third, a middle category is represented by a number of recent examples. The Encarta World English Dictionary (1999, 2176 pp.) was reviewed by Sidney I. Landau in Dictionaries (2000, 112-24), and The American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition (2000, 2074 pp.) was reviewed by M. Lynne Murphy in Dictionaries (2001, 181-99) . NOAD is a new entry into this field. Here I look at The New Oxford American in part by comparing it with two other weighty tomes: The New Oxford Dictionary ofEnglish (NODE) (1998 [2152 pp.]) and The American Heritage Dictionary (AHD4) cited above. Comparison with the other Oxford dictionary is appropriate because that British work is the basis for the American dictionary, which is essentially a naturalized form of its predecessor. Comparison with The American Heritage is appropriate because it and NOAD are both recent works focusing on cis-Atlantic English. General Overview In addition to the main body of dictionary entries, which is the heart of any dictionary, some peripheral material is to be expected. The New Oxford American has the following additional contents: Dictionaries:Journal ofthe Dictionary Society ofNorth America 24 (2003) Reviews237 1.Lists of the dictionary's staff, advisory board, and specialist subject consultants (4 pages) . 2.A preface, which is a de rigueur statement of the dictionary's strengths (1 page). 3.An introduction, which supplies detailed information about the dictionary's structure, methods, organization, and so on (9 pages). 4.A guide to "How to use this dictionary," which presents the most essential information of the preceding section in graphic form by sample entries labeled to identify important features of an entry (3 pages). 5.A pronunciation key to identify the symbols used in entering a word's pronunciation (1 page). In addition, a dictionary's front matter may include some supplementary general information about the language that a user may be presumed to benefit from when consulting the dictionary. The New Oxford American has one such essay, on "American Voices," by William A. Kretzschmar,Jr. (11 pages), an informative and well-informed overview of American speech. One suspects that the real purpose of such introductory matter (and I write here as one who has himself produced such an essay for a college dictionary) is as testimony to the dictionary's gravitas as much as for the education of the dictionary's users, few of whom are destined ever to delve into diose pages. Finally, at the back of the dictionary may be a variety of appended information , ostensibly intended to be helpful to users by supplying them with various "ibonis" (to resurrect an invented word from my college days, an acronym for "interesting bits of needless information," pronounced in die singular , to use NOAD's symbols, 'ibane). NOAD ends with a "Ready Reference" section including such bits as the following: The History of English (3 pages) Usage Guide (3+ pages) Punctuation Guide (3 pages) Diacriticals and Proofreader's Marks (1 page) States of the United States of America (1 page) Presidents of the United States of America (1 page) The Declaration of Independence (2 pages) Constitution of die United States (5 pages) Amendments to the Constitution (8 pages) Countries of the World, with capitals, continents, and terms for the inhabitants (4 pages) Chemical Elements, with symbols and atomic weights (1 page) Standard Weights and Measures widi Metric...