The User's^® Webster is a relatively new concept in lexicography. Its linguistic principles were enunciated at length in our Preface to The Penguin Canadian Dictionary (Toronto, 1990) and professionally reviewed in the 1990 Dictionaries, Journal of The Dictionary Society of North America. It was gratifying to see some of those principles, especially the role of abstract definitions, adopted in the 1995 Cambridge International Dictionary of English.

What is new to The User's^® Webster is the entering of the most common collocations of the language as lexical items, inventoried like words, phrases, pronunciations, derivatives, idioms, etc. Hence the plenitude of illustrative material, which may surprise those who are used to seeing only one phrase or sentence per definition.

This new dimension of the dictionary is based on the linguistic fact that, in the normal and natural course, people acquire languages mainly by listening and imitation. Children, as they grow older, understand, without the benefit of formal definitions, words heard in context and use them in grammatical sentences of their own with the appropriate parts of speech and inflectional forms.

The User's^® dictionary formalizes this knowledge and, within its limited scope, offers a representative sample of the typical combinations of words and structures heard in everyday discourse. All careful users of the language, learners as well as learned, resort to dictionaries for guidance on matters of usage besides the more common uses of checking spelling and meaning.

Speaking of learners and learned, as Professor Claire Kramsch of University of California (Berkeley) recently stated in her guest column headed "The privilege of the nonnative speaker" (PMLA, May 1997), "Originally ... those who were born into a language were considered its native speakers, with grammatical intuitions that nonnative speakers did not have .... In the last ten years, linguists have started to examine [the native speaker] construct critically, beginning with Thomas Paikeday in his 1985 book The Native Speaker Is Dead!" (end of what may sound like blowing one's horn).

The User's^® Webster is based on the principle of mainstreaming the "linguistically challenged" with those considered normal. We think the native-speaker / foreign-learner distinction is somewhat invidious and therefore unnecessary.

Briefly, the following are the new features of this dictionary:

1. DECODING (finding the meaning): To help the user determine which definition each word being looked up falls under, especially when context is lacking, the common collocations of the defined word are given. For example, in the usages of Georgian, as in a Georgian country house, drawl, four-poster, mansion; Georgian independence, nationalism; the Georgian period, style, the dictionary helps the user determine which ones refer to the State of Georgia, the country of Georgia, and Georges of England. In the usages of global (a global change, command, effect, epidemic, scale, strategy, view, war; global implications, issues, strategies), which ones mean "worldwide" and which "all-inclusive"? Is a live-in maid necessarily in a live-in relationship?

2. ENCODING (using a word or meaning idiomatically): The listing of accepted combinations of a word should help the user use the word idiomatically, as blue (meaning "off-color"), which is used in blue jokes, language, movies; "blue drama, prose, verse" would not make sense. The same goes for electric battery, current, guitar, heating, lighting, power, etc. as distinguished from electrical activity, appliance, discharge, engineer, equipment, industries, etc.

3. SYNONYM DISCRIMINATION: To help the user use synonyms idiomatically, pairs like frail and fragile are defined and then distinguished by showing how they are used instead of giving supplementary synonym notes. Thus, we say: a fragile condition, environment, toy, truce; fragile happiness, but a frail beauty, constitution, excuse, flower, smile, voice; frail hands, hopes, humanity; in frail health. Similarly, triplets like nutritional, nutritious, and nutritive: nutritional aspects, claims, data, deficiency, needs, value, but delicious and nutritious dishes; Spinach is very nutritious; a nutritious breakfast, diet, food, meal, and nutritive functions, plasma; the nutritive process. See also primeval, primitive, and primordial.

4. ADJECTIVES, ATTRIBUTIVE AND PREDICATIVE: As clearly laid out in A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Randolph Quirk, et al., Longman, 1985), criteria for adjectives are: (a) attributive use; (b) predicative use with copula seem; (c) pre-modification by very; (d) comparability. We have labeled adj. only adjectives that meet the first two criteria; these (which we call true adjectives) form the vast majority.

However, an adjective like possessed in the sense of "having" as in a woman possessed of initiative, or "controlled" as in possessed with fury and possessed by missionary zeal cannot be used attributively, as in a possessed person. In a possessed person or She is possessed, the word is used as an adj. meaning "controlled by an evil spirit." We have tried to distinguish such usages by labeling predicative adjectives (the first two of the above examples) adjp. The adja. (attributive adjective) label is used for adjectives like piecemeal as in piecemeal changes, operations, reforms; a piecemeal approach, expansion, process; in a piecemeal fashion.

Language being a changing entity, an adjective that is attributive today may gain predicative use tomorrow, as fraught in the senses of "very tense" and "worrisome." Since the late sixties (cf. The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition), usages such as a controversy that is passionate and fraught; a fraught atmosphere, issue, situation have become acceptable English.

5. COLLOCATIONS AND STRUCTURES: (a) What modifier to use, as before a noun such as comeback ("recovery"), as in a big, major, quick, strong comeback. (b) What nouns it may modify, as in comeback kid, plan, trail. (c) What verbs to use with this noun, as to make, plan, stage a comeback, etc. Often a user may know that differences (in the sense of "disagreements") may be settled, but wants to know what alternative words are available. The thesaurus gives conclude, confirm, decide, determine, and judge as synonyms for settle, but verbs that may be idiomatically used with differences are compose, reconcile, resolve, set aside, and thrash out. (d) The various structures in which cinch ("something easy to do") or cold turkey ("abruptly") is used. (e) What prepositions to use with a word such as gloom, as in gloom about or over the future of the environment.

6. DEADWOOD: As in avoiding abstract definitions, we eschew entries for words that do not exist in current English; e.g., sophisticate as a verb. Only the noun sophisticate and adjective sophisticated are used in current English; we have tried to do justice to those uses; the same for straiten.

7. USABLE PRONUNCIATIONS: We use a pronunciation system that is based on common English spellings that the user is familiar with (without using unnecessary and un-English respellings like "rayj" for rage and "stohr" for store) instead of an abstract system of diacritical marks or the International Phonetic Alphabet which require a key for decoding. (A full explanation of this spelling-based pronunciation system is given in the author's "Who Needs IPA?" in English Today, January 1993, Cambridge, U.K.).

8. VOCABULARY: The User's^® Webster is a revised and expanded edition of our New York Times Everyday Dictionary (New York, 1982). The vocabulary we have added has been drawn from a CD-ROM database of hundreds of contemporary books and journals published in the U.S. in the 1990s, supplemented by a smaller selection of Canadian and British publications. The dictionary should not need revision for at least another decade, when minimal changes will be required. (More about this in our "O Corpora!", Lexicographica, Tübingen, August 1992).

Occasionally we have gone out of our way to satisfy special interests, as in including four-letter words. With all due respect, in a professional job done for our friend Bob Ilson, editor of the Oxford International Journal of Lexicography at the time, one positive comment that his reviewer of The Penguin Canadian Dictionary had to make was the elevation of her "cunt-fuck-shit" trinity as the touchstone of a 75,000-entry dictionary meant for schools (IJL, Autumn 1994). Kathy Rooney of Bloomsbury Publishing will not miss those and similar taboo words in this work meant for a wider audience. However, user discretion is advised.

In this connection, users may want to compare The User's^® Webster Dictionary with so-called learner's dictionaries and dictionaries of word combinations in regard to practical value and usefulness.

The User's^® Webster Dictionary should come in handy for all the uses that may be reasonably expected of dictionaries of this size and price range by a variety of users. We earnestly hope this will be found to be a truly user-friendly dictionary. The streaks of humor appearing in it (as at disposal, last word, and wink, though tastes may differ) merely show that the English-speaking people are not a humorless lot.