Re: Merriam-Webster's Unabridged vs Oxford English Dictionary

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

The Third International dates, as you say, to 1961, has
not been, and will not be, updated. Every few years
there's a new printing with Addenda in the front. M-W's
energies go into the Collegiate series, now in their 11th
ed., the standard for American publishers.

The MW3I and the OED are utterly different and basically
cannot be compared. Have you looked inside them?

Why they cannot be compared? They both contain meaning of a
word, pronunciation, etymology and examples of usage. I
can't see any principal difference between them.


OED describes English, very rarely American, usage.


Here's quotation from OED site <http://www.oed.com/about/>:

-------
The OED covers words from across the English-speaking world,
from North America to South Africa, from Australia and New
Zealand to the Caribbean. It also offers the best in
etymological analysis and in listing of variant spellings,
and it shows pronunciation using the International Phonetic
Alphabet.
-------

There is no way to recommend any one dictionary without
knowing what you want to use it for.

I don't have any specific purpose in mind. I want to have
comprehensive dictionary of modern English (preferably in
digital form) to do words lookup occasionally.

Thanks
Alex


.

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