Word: websterisms
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...troops there; Webster's has 450,000 words...
...misread as a hedge for a U.S. pullout at any price. "Nobody can accuse us of a soft attitude," said the President. "If anyone doubts the basis of our commitment, they will find that we have more troops in Viet Nam than there are words in the Webster's New Dictionary...
...explanation is relatively simple. For one thing, Random House's dictionary is a bargain: $25 per copy, as against $47.50 for the nearest competitors (Funk & Wagnall's, Webster's Third International). For another, the need for a new big dictionary definitely existed. Webster's was last updated five years ago; other dictionaries go as far back, unrevised though reissued, to 1913. For a third, Random House has dropped the word count of big dictionaries to 260,000 from an average of 400,000. Thus it may qualify as the first heavyweight dictionary truly designed for ordinary...
Current & Clear. Random House concedes that Webster's Third contains more words (it has 450,000 of the roughly half-million in the English language). Between parade and paradise, for example, the new dictionary omits such Webster's words-mostly medicalese-as para-dental, paradentitis, paraden-tium, paradentosis, parader-mal, paradesmose, paradiazine. Cerf argues that such entries are "words no one would ever use or has ever heard...
Another plus for Random House, except for the most fastidious word worriers, is that its computer-compiled definitions are relatively concise. It first defines anthropomorphic as "ascribing human form or attributes to a being or thing not human, esp. to a deity." Webster's repetitiously expands this to "described or conceived in a human form or with human attributes: represented with human characteristics or under a human form: ascribing human characteristics to nonhuman things: crudely human or man-centered in character...