The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

by William Morris (Editor)

Hardcover, 1978

Collection

Description

"Thoroughly revised, the fifth edition contains 10,000 new words and senses, over 4,000 ... new full-color images, and authoritaive, up-to-date guidance on usage from the ... American Heritage Usage Panel ... Thousands of definitions have been revised in rapidly changing fields such as astronomy and biology, geographical entries and maps have been completely updated, and the dictionary's signature feature notes on word history, synonymy, and language variation have been enhanced and improved"--Dust jacket flap.

Rating

(179 ratings; 4.3)

User reviews

LibraryThing member varwenea

I swiped this from my brother's bookcase many, many moons ago in my mid high school years. :) It's my old friend that still beckons me to behold it now and then, despite my habit of opening a browser and typing 'define ____'. All the thumbnail stickers of 'AB', 'CD' have fallen off. But holding it

in my hand still feels like the true authority of the English language - a much better time before the butchering done by texting, endless acronyms, and poorly invented words. A solid must have English dictionary for anyone respectful of the language.

Well, ok - it pressed a few flower petals for me too.

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LibraryThing member janerogers

For many years my favorite of the desk size dictionaries. It's literate, beautifully designed, pages are alluring, and this edition brought back the Indo European roots appendix.

LibraryThing member auntieknickers

This has been our preferred dictionary since the first edition.

LibraryThing member dreamreader

Back in 1971 when I was fresh out of college and working at a Boston ad agency, we were launching the first edition of this outstanding dictionary. Since then, and despite the ubiquitous availability of online word-lookups, I have continued to update my AHD to the new edition whenever it's been

released. It's partly brand loyalty, but moreso an appreciation for the uniquley entertaining way the dictionary was designed - with color photographs and often humorous references you won't find in Merriam Webster (and I worked on that account, too, in later years).

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LibraryThing member AlexTheHunn

The American Heritage Dictionary is a fine, workhorse of a dictionary, attuned for American's needs. I like this for its etymological background. It is not too cumbersome to use for writing. In truth, electronic dictionaries render it unsued in my own experience.

LibraryThing member lorsomething

I know dictionaries are just tools (to most, anyway) and not something generally held in affection, but I love this book. It has never failed me.

LibraryThing member branadain

This is by far my favorite dictionary--the best you can get for the price. Contains detailed usage notes for many entries, especially for easily confused words. Good etymological data. Color illustrations in margins. Biographical entries for famous/historical people. It is very up-to-date, and I

often find entries for technological, political, and social terms that I wouldn't have expected.

If you don't have the money or space for the OED, this is the next best thing.

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LibraryThing member keylawk

200,000 boldface forms, 4,000 pieces of art, from nearly 2000 sources, with 175 contributors.

Includes Essays: Natural History of English {"The simplification of consonant clusters ...is commonplace [among Gullah and Creole] as well as in the Scots dialect of Robert Burns [xxiib]}, The

Indo-European Origin {"The Sanskrit language...is of a wonderful structure...Greek...Latin...no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists[xxiv]}; Usage: The Place of Criticism {the "correctness" has had a litigious history--Webster defended double-negatives}; Mathematics of Language {regarding word processing and retrieval; 33 phonemes; one-million-word compilation called the Brown Corpus, compiled from 500 sources; 57 percent of the tokens have 4 letters or less, but in a dictionary, only 9 percent[xxxii]; Shakespear's complete works consist of 884,647 words, of which 29,066 are different, and 18,000 lemmas [word forms -- cf for inflected language like Russian , words may have as many as 10 lemmas]; the 100 most common lemmas take up 49.6% of the tokens; 3000 words take up 80% of the Corpus}, Indo-European Roots.
One last thing: Did I mention the Pictures? Nothing like a glance at a canopic, or a chignon, or a sphenoid or a spinnaker, to understand instantly WHAT it is. There should be a LOT more pictures in Dictionaries, and this one gets that drift.

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LibraryThing member languagehat

The first edition of the AHD came out while I was in college and was the first dictionary I fell in love with: the illustrations! Indo-European roots! The 4th ed. is even better, and has Semitic roots as well.

LibraryThing member foof2you

What can one say it is a dictionary. Print is pretty small tough reading unless you have great eyesight. It is the one that I currently use and find it very helpful.

LibraryThing member frizero

This dictionary is precious, a flawless reference to American English in terms of language and culture. Any teacher of English, translator or dedicated learner should make an effort to have one in its private library!

LibraryThing member edwardv

In terms of its physical quality this is the best book in my collection. A superb resource for the English languish. Compact enough to be handy, large enough to be authoritative. Heavily illustrated and annotated; it also include etymologies and essays on the history of the English language,

Indo-European origins, usage, dialects, grammar and meaning, and spelling and pronunciation.

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LibraryThing member vpfluke

Now that Andrew Bingham recently died, I took a look at my LT entry and saw that I had not put a review and did not list the other editorial staff. So, I needed to remedy this. And I want to say this dictionary is my favorite of all time. I liked a Barnhart dictionary as a youngster as it showed

what were the most common words in English. The American Heritage Dictionary doesn't do any stats won word frequency, but it does much more. The etymologies are great. I knew Latin and French when I bought this decades ago and had an incursion into Spanish. So, I was a word person. What's more there is a glossary on Indo-European roots and discovered now words are related to each other, some surprisingly so. The IE root, bhel (1), has spawned words as different as blanc (white in French - but white in English is kweit derived and Latin has alb), blue, blond, blind, black, fulgent, flame, bleak, blaze and so forth. There are also small articles on usage, dialects, grammar & meaning, and computers in lexicography.

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