#000597
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, The Unabridged Edition
Jess Stein (Editor in Chief)
A monumental single-volume unabridged dictionary of American English, first published in 1966 with some 315,000 entries across roughly 2,250 pages, plus 2,400 illustrations and a raft of supplements — a world atlas and gazetteer, and concise French, Spanish, Italian, and German dictionaries bound in. Edited in chief by Jess Stein, it grew out of Random House's postwar entry into reference publishing and its earlier *American College Dictionary*. Its lasting claim to fame is technological: it was the first major dictionary compiled and typeset with the aid of computers, drawing on a 25-million-word corpus. Comprehensive, handsomely made, and a fixture on library reference shelves for decades, it stands as both a serious record of mid-twentieth-century English and a milestone in how dictionaries came to be made.
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The editor
Jess Stein (1914–1984) was a distinguished American lexicographer who served as editor in chief of Random House's reference program. Working with Laurence Urdang as managing editor, he oversaw a large team expanding the American College Dictionary into a full unabridged work, and later shepherded Random House's college and desk dictionaries.
The book
Published by Random House in 1966, the Unabridged Edition contains roughly 315,000 entries and pioneered computer-assisted compilation and typesetting — Urdang had begun exploring data processing with IBM as early as 1959, using a corpus of some 25 million words.
How it has aged
As a snapshot of 1960s American English it remains valuable, and its production methods were genuinely influential on the trade. But like any print dictionary it is now decades behind the living language; the line was later revised as Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, and online, continuously updated references have overtaken the standalone tome for everyday lookups.
For more context
Histories of lexicography note its place as the first computer-assisted dictionary.
Sources - Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary — Wikipedia - The first dictionary prepared with computers — History of Information
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Jess Stein (Editor in Chief)
- Publisher
- Random House
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1966
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Reference
- Location
- Colorado