Word: govenesses
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Philip Babcock Gove, editor in chief, Webster's Third New International Dictionary Litt.D...
...comparing two such behemoths among books, statistics and random samplings become a necessity. On this level, the new dictionary suffers everywhere. William Allan Neilson's 1934 edition contains 600,000 entries, while Philip Gove's 1961 contains only 450,000. Since Gove's staff catalogued 100,000 new words this time, a quarter of a million words must have been dropped from the second edition. For years, Webster's unabridged has listed more words than any dictionary in any language. Now, because of scientific arrivistes to the English vocabulary (like pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcaniconiosis) Webster's no longer commands the serious interest...
William Allan Neilson, out of a humane regard for the history of our language, extended the scope of the second edition as far back as 1500. He also provided readers with a complete Chaucerian vocabulary. Philip Gove has chosen to eliminate all words obsolete before 1740. The damage done to the study of Tudor and Stuart literature is not easily calculated. Such a policy destroys any claims to scholarship Webster's might make. No matter how many experts and Ph.D's spent their time writing definitions for this new lexicon, the fact still remains that 250,000 words...
Says Editor Gove: "The English language is not a system of logic. What we start with is an inchoate heterogeneous agglomerate that retains the indestructible bones of innumerable tries at orderly communication." In short, writing dictionaries ain't easy...
Headed by scholarly Philip B. Gove. 59, a onetime English teacher at New York University, Merriam-Webster's Ph.D.-proud editors toil in a Georgian edifice in Springfield, Mass., that looks more like a college library than a company HQ. They began collecting a new batch of commonly used words before their last edition came out (complete with a misspelling-Brünnehilde...