A new edition of the first, the original, and the best of all phrase and fable dictionaries - an encyclopaedia of general cultural knowledge. Each entry has been re-read for this edition and updated and amended where necessary. The biggest Brewer's ever - well over a million words of text, 18,500 main entries and tens of thousands of sub-entries. 1000 entirely new entries, including contemporary phrases and expressions, and historical and fictional characters. Vastly enhanced coverage of present-day idiomatic expressions.
Adrian Room, who has revised the millennium edition of Brewer's, is the author of over 50 popular reference books, mainly on the origins of words. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the English Place-Name Society. He lives in Lincolnshire.
The first edition of this dictionary was published in 1870; the 15th in 1995. The 16th edition contains 1000 new entries, including paparazzi,Œ full monty,Œ couch potato,Œ and millennium bug.Œ It also adds more quotations and subentries (examples of usage) while eliminating a few entries from previous editions because of obscurity. As the foreword points out, to be considered obscure by a Brewer¡s editor is a real badge of obscurity,Œ and the dictionary is, indeed, astonishing in its coverage. It is not, of course, perfect. The arrangement is strictly alphabetical, and, though See and See also references are given, intuitive searching may be difficult. For example, the phrase to climb on the bandwagonŒ is under climbŒ rather than bandwagon.Œ In addition, the book continues to be Anglocentric, though the editors appear to be making an effort to include other cultures. Nevertheless, there is no other reference quite like Brewer¡s; if you need to know what hendiadysŒ means or figure out which hawk to buy for a prince, you¡ll find it here and probably nowhere else. Libraries that do not own a copy of an earlier edition should certainly consider acquiring this reference.¢Katherine K. Koenig, Ellis Sch., Pittsburgh Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
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