Speaking of new words in dictionaries, your college dictionary is now in its fourth edition. Whats the difference between a revision or update and a new edition?
A. Good dictionary publishers will update their flagship dictionaries every year or two, adding vital new words that have established themselves in the language and updating biographical and geographical data. You can check the date of the last such revision by looking at the dictionary’s copyright page. Revising in this way calls for changing individual pages to allow for the insertion of new entries and their definitions, which demands considerable ingenuity on the part of editors. After several of these updatings, editors find the need to sit back, examine the whole work, re-think the book’s structure and presentation, and then embark on a ground-up rewriting of the entire dictionary, from A to Z. Such a project may take five years or longer, but it allows for the maximum number of new words to be added. Compiling our fourth edition allowed us to enter more than 7,000 new entries. Naturally, any new edition draws heavily on its predecessor, but it really is a whole new book in its o
