MERRIAM-WEBSTER’S COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY

(ELEVENTH EDITION)

Contents

Preface

Explanatory Notes

The English Language in the Dictionary

Guide to Pronunciation

Pronunciation Symbols

A Dictionary of the English Language

Foreign Words and Phrases

Biographical Names

Geographical Names

Signs and Symbols

A Handbook of Style

Preface

When Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary was first published, the year was 1898, and Americans were being exhorted to “remember the Maine.” As the eleventh consecutive edition of this standard reference book appears, we have crossed the nearly inconceivable divide between the second and third millennia of the modern era, but since daily lives can scarcely be led in constant awareness of a span of time that vast, we now situate ourselves, for the most part, in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Over the time between these editions, the world has made its way through two global wars and many others of a more limited kind; wide-ranging social, political, and economic change (not to say, revolution); and successive waves of technological change that have transformed communication, transportation, information storage and retrieval, and great numbers of other human activities. At every turn these events and developments have had a major effect on the stock of words that English speakers use, and it has been the job of a good general dictionary to record these changes. The present book is the latest effort by the editorial team of Merriam-Webster to meet that responsibility.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, like all earlier editions is meant to serve the general public as its chief source of information about the words of our language. Its title may suggest a special appropriateness for the older student, but those who work in offices and those who read, think, and write at home will equally find it a trustworthy guide to the English of our day.

The ever-expanding vocabulary of our language exerts inexorable pressure on the contents of any dictionary. Words and senses are born at a far greater rate than that at which they die out. The 1664 pages of this Collegiate make it the most comprehensive ever published. And its treatment of words is as nearly exhaustive as the compass of an abridged work permits. As in all Merriam-Webster dictionaries, the information given is based on the collection of 15,700,000 citations maintained in the offices of this company. These citations show words used in a wide range of printed sources, and the collection is constantly being augmented through the efforts of the editorial staff. Thus, the user of the dictionary may be confident that entries in the Collegiate are based on current as well as older material. The citation files hold 5,700,000 more examples than were available to the editors of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, published in 1961, and 1,200,000 more than the editors of the Tenth Edition had at their disposal. The editors of this edition also had ...