Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary is a large Americandictionary, first published in 1966 asThe 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. TheCD-ROM version in 1994 also included 120,000 spoken pronunciations.[1]
TheRandom House publishing company entered thereference book market after World War II. They acquired rights to theCentury Dictionary and theDictionary of American English, both out of print. Their first dictionary wasClarence Barnhart'sAmerican College Dictionary, published in 1947, and based primarily onThe New Century Dictionary, an abridgment of theCentury.[2][3]
In the late 1950s, it was decided to publish an expansion of theAmerican College Dictionary, which had been modestly updated with each reprinting since its publication. Under editors Jess Stein andLaurence Urdang, they augmented theAmerican College Dictionary with large numbers of entries in all fields, primarily proper names, and published it in 1966 asThe Random House Dictionary of the English Language: The Unabridged Edition. It was the first dictionary to use computers in its compilation andtypesetting. The dataset for compiling the dictionary contained a 25,000,000-word corpus.[4]
In his preface to the 1966 edition, Stein wrote (p. vi) that theRandom House Dictionary steers "a linguistically sound middle course" between the "lexicographer'sScylla and Charybdis: should the dictionary be an authoritarian guide to 'correct' English or should it be so antiseptically free of comment that it may defeat the user by providing him with no guidance at all?"[5] In 1982 Random House published The Random House ProofReader, a computerspell checker based on its dictionary.[6]
An expanded second edition of the printed dictionary, edited byStuart Berg Flexner, appeared in 1987, revised in 1993. This edition adopted theMerriam-Webster Collegiate practice of adding dates for the entry of words into the language. Unlike theCollegiate, which cited the date of the first known citation,Random House indicated a range of dates. For example, where theCollegiate gave 1676,Random House might offer 1670–80. This second edition was described as permissive byT. R. Reid in theWashington Post.[7]
Random House incorporated the nameWebster's into the dictionary's title after an appeals court overturned an injunction awarded toMerriam Webster restricting the name's use.[8] The nameRandom House Webster's is now used on many Random House publications.[citation needed]
In 2001, Random House published itsWebster's Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, based on the Second Edition of theRandom House Dictionary of the English Language.[citation needed]
Versions of the dictionary have been published under other names, includingWebster's New Universal Dictionary (which was previously the name of an entirely different dictionary),Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary, andWebster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language.[citation needed]
Dictionary.com's online dictionary bases its proprietary content on theRandom House unabridged version.[9]
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