About the Author

David Crystal is the Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor. His previous books include The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, English as a Global Language, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, Language Death, and Words on Words, the last published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

"The kind of dictionary you lose yourself in the moment you open it up. . . . You look up 'Isogloss' and get distracted by the fact, on the facing page, that Etruscan, Mohenjo-Daro and Japanese are isolated languages. Then you suddenly notice an entry for 'felicity conditions, ' find out what the hell that is before you go mad, then forget what you were looking for in the first place, but who cares? You can keep going for hours."--Nicholas Lezard "The Guardian"