Language Ideologies and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Evidence from Motive, Structure, and Design

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1969) was established as the arch-prescriptive alternative to the arch-descriptive Webster’s Third (1961), and it expressed that language ideology in innovative ways, notably in establishing a Usage Panel with which the editors would consult on disputed matters of usage in view of including Usage Notes about those matters in the dictionary’s text. It also favored standards of correctness set in edited prose, relying for much of its word list, spellings, etc., on the Brown Corpus, use of which, even in this limited way, was also an innovation. Yet the first edition included structural elements that pointed in a more descriptive direction, and successive editions, by means of structure and design, qualified the dictionary’s prescriptive tendencies and re-positioned it ideologically as neither exactly prescriptive nor descriptive but something ideologically more complex and interesting.