Deep delvers will need to seek out a more detailed etymological work for less common terms. Despite its physical size, approaching that of a desk dictionary, its scope is limited to the most common 25,000 or so words (only a small proportion of those in the average desk dictionary, though many more than in the other works cited above). This book will be most useful to students of the language and to general readers who want more detail than can be gleaned from the average dictionary. This makes Chambers’ works non-uniform, as the Chambers Dictionary has its own (rather different) scheme, and the Chambers 21st Century Dictionary uses IPA. Since this edition is the same as the original American one, these pronunciations are for American rather than British English and they use a key developed from normal English spelling, avoiding the typographic conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that many people find difficult to use. Entries are in clear prose, with Greek terms transliterated into Roman spelling, and pronunciations added for difficult headwords.
The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology is different on both counts - it is reasonably priced, and it is written in a way that is easy to consult without losing its scholarly integrity. There are other, more formal, dictionaries of etymology available for example in Europe Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, but they are frequently difficult for the non-linguist to understand, and they are uniformly expensive. (The best and most scholarly is probably John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, but I would also mention The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, which has longish articles on a small range of key words.) There are quite a number of books dealing with the origins of individual words, but most are highly selective in their choice of terms and they are variably reliable. Chambers have added the book to their stable of works on the language that includes the idiosyncratic and famous Chambers Dictionary and the Chambers 21st Century Dictionary, a new edition of which has also just come out.
It has the same text as the original from the H W Wilson Company and indeed, to judge from the printing, seems to be a facsimile. Foiled Coverīeautiful bespoke foiling makes Chambers stand out as the dictionary of distinction.This work is really going around under an alias, as it’s a British edition of the 1988 Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, a respected work from the US which until now has been available in the UK only by a pricey purchase from a transatlantic bookseller. The Chambers Dictionary keeps definitions short, creating space for more intriguing, obscure and historically charged entries. Proving yet again that Chambers is the dictionary of choice for providing luxurious finishing touches, the 13th edition includes two ribbons, a strong cloth binding built to last and an extra durable dust jacket. Includes an all-new ‘Word Lover’s Miscellany’ section which focuses on the history of Chambers and the important words and quirky definitions which have been added in each of the 13 editions back to 1872. The Chambers Dictionary will lie perfectly flat on a desk, ensuring the whole page is visible, even definitions leading into the spine. The Chambers 13th edition contains more words, phrases and meanings than its predecessors and more than any other single-volume English dictionary. Chambers appreciate that its readers are passionate about words and with this in mind we offered readers the chance to enter their own suggestions to be published in the new 13th edition.Ĭhambers is the dictionary of choice for crossword solvers, Scrabble © fans and wordgame enthusiasts.
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