Butterfield - Fowlers Concise Dictionary of Modern English Usage

Fowlers Concise Dictionary of Modern English Usage gives readers accessible guidance on the best use of todays English. It offers over 4,500 succinct, reasoned entries with detailed explanations and clear recommendations that help you to express yourself in a way that is both up to date and correct. An abridged version of the most celebrated book ever published on English usage, Fowlers Modern English Usage, it condenses the wealth of information in that work for the benefit of readers who need speedy access to authoritative guidance.

Fowlers Concise Dictionary answers the whole range of queries posed by people striving to write correct, current English. It includes guidance on tricky points of grammar (whether to use which or that, everyone followed by plural pronouns), spelling (co-, fulfil, idiosyncrasy), punctuation (semicolon, comma), syntax (bored with or by, data, singular or plural), style (clichs, iconic), and appropriate word choice (classic / classical, confusable words).

Hundreds of authentic examples drawn from the unique resources available to Oxford University Press illustrate the points under discussion. Chief among those resources is the Oxford English Corpus (abbreviated in the text to OEC), a database of written and spoken twenty-first century English from all over the world. It contains two and a half billion words of texts, and covers the whole gamut of English writing styles from literary novels and specialist journals to everyday newspapers and magazines, blogs, emails, and social media. Downloaded largely from Internet websites, these texts provide comprehensive evidence about how English is used (and misused) at all levels of formality throughout the English-speaking world.

When crucial information can be presented most clearly in table form, entries are given a special layout. These entries are of several kinds. Some provide information on interesting aspects of English, such as American English, dialect, misquotations ; some summarize and list points that recur throughout the dictionary, such as gender-neutrality or Latin plurals; others, such as mute e and -able, -ible, provide general rules to help unravel the complexities of English spelling.

This dictionary is an updated version of Robert Allens 2008 Pocket Fowlers Modern English Usage, which was a cut-down of Fowlers Modern English Usage. The present text adds around 200 new entries to the Pocket. All existing entries were reviewed, and those that required bringing up to date or further clarification were edited accordingly. A few entries seemed no longer relevant and have been dropped. In their place are the new entries, among which the reader will find words reflecting changes in communication since 2008 , such as hashtag, phablet, selfie, tweet, unfriend, unfollow, viral, and wilfing.

Several new entries discuss mistakes which, though themselves not new, have become more widespread: obtuse used to mean abstruse, alot spelt as one word, baited breath for bated breath, eminent danger for imminent danger. (The symbol throughout the dictionary indicates an incorrect or unacceptable use.) Other new entries discuss the clichs and euphemisms that continue to thrive in certain kinds of discourse, e.g. address (verb), best practice, challenging, collateral damage, community, defining moment, steep learning curve.

Vogue words come and go, and those added to this volume include achingly, angsty, best practice, closure, reference (verb), and passionate. Retained from the earlier text is iconic, which Robert Allen described as a word that appears to have become all of a sudden as indispensable as it is meaningless in practically every paragraph of popular journalism.

Apart from checking in the