Webster's New World College Dictionary, Fifth Edition

Great dictionary

Definitely the best dictionary among modern ones !

The 5th Edition of This Great Dictionary Takes Its Honourable Place among Earlier Ones of Webster's

I long have used the Webster's New World Dictionary of American English, the most recommendable and comprehensive of its variants being any designated for "college" (in U.S.A. lingo including "university") use. Having just received the new Fifth Edition ("new" in this year of 2014) causes me to ponder the unbroken excellence of every edition of this great American dictionary. The edition which most people usually think of as the first one of this dictionary was the only English dictionary which students at the college where I did my freshman and sophomore years of study, in the mid-1960s, were permitted to cite as their lexical authority (the then recently debased "Collegiate" dictionary from Merriam-Webster, having been prime among the dictionaries that students were forbidden to use in writing their papers and assignments). By the time of its Fifth Edition, the Webster's New World Dictionary has become so compendious, so hefty, that it now barely fits the format of a single volume dictionary. The Fourth Edition already had been "groaning at the seams". To accommodate what appears surely to be a larger base of vocabulary of terms, abbreviations, names, etc. (the totals of which the dictionary's introductory features themselves do not quantify explicitly, unless something has eluded my glance), the Fifth Edition (comparing it here only to the Fourth Edition), even though it has decreased slightly in pagination, has cut out some extraneous (albeit useful) features from the "Reference Supplement", and has decreased slightly (but noticeably) the print size in the main bulk of the work. To limit the comparison to the main paging sequence between the two most recent editions, one goes from the Fourth's 1716 p. to the Fifth's total of 1703 p. The "Reference Supplement" at the end of the Fifth Edition has dropped some features which orient specifically to the United States and which were found in the Fourth Edition's more numerous sub-sections therein (e.g., among such ...