Newest Dictionary

THE LANGUAGE

Without a blush, Publisher Bennett Cerf predicted last week that while Samuel Johnson was the great lexicog rapher of the 18th century and Noah Webster of the 19th, Random House will be the best of the 20th. Then Cerf, who helps run Random House between stints on What's My Line?, held up the evidence: the new 2,059-page, 260,000-word Random House Dictionary of the English Language. It took seven years to compile, cost $3,000,000, and at a $25 sales price, says Cerf, it is "the workingman's dictionary."

The big book is obviously aimed at a broader market than the one now domnated by the five-year-old Webster's Third New Interna tional Dictionary, which sells for $47.50, the 13-volume Oxford English Dictionary, which was last updated in 1933 and costs $300, and the $47.50 Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary of the English Language, mainly unchanged since 1913. Random House has a bigger, cleaner type face, includes names of notable places and people in its regular alphabetical word list, throws in such usable extras as a 64-page world atlas and a list of major dates. Most alluring of its extras are concise two-way subdictionaries of all commonplace words in Spanish, French, Italian and German. "We will include Russian as soon as they become our ally," says Cerf.

Current & Clear. Random House concedes that Webster's Third contains more words (it has 450,000 of the roughly half-million in the English language). Between parade and paradise, for example, the new dictionary omits such Webster's words--mostly medicalese--as para-dental, paradentitis, paraden-tium, paradentosis, parader-mal, paradesmose, paradiazine. Cerf argues that such entries are "words no one would ever use or has ever heard of."

Random House can also rightfully claim that although its words are fewer, many are newer. It includes such current terms as the Yiddish chutzpa ("unmitigated effrontery or impudence"), ye-ye ("of, pertaining to, or characteristic of young sophisticates"), and even Mary Poppins' supercalifragilisticexpi-alidocious ("used as a nonsense word by children to represent the longest word in English").

Another plus for Random House, except for the most fastidious word worriers, is that its computer-compiled definitions are relatively concise. It first defines anthropomorphic as "ascribing human form or attributes to a being or thing not human, esp. to a deity." Webster's repetitiously expands this to "described or conceived in a human form or with human attributes: represented with human characteristics or under a human form: ascribing human characteristics to nonhuman things: crudely human or man-centered in character."

Readers who expect their dictionary to settle arguments over proper spelling and usage will be just as disappointed with Random House as they were with Webster's Third. Unlike the authoritarian stance of Webster's Second Edition, the newer dictionaries follow the friendly, noncommittal practice of reporting the alternatives but avoiding what Random House Editor Jess Stein calls "personal viewpoints." Kidnaped and kidnapped are both O.K. with the new volume, as are busing and bussing (meaning traveling, not kissing). But it does advise the reader on how society is apt to regard some words. It lists ain't, for example, but warns that "it should be shunned by all who prefer to avoid being considered illiterate."

Puritans who cried that Webster's Third debased the language by including four-letter obscenities will be just as irked at Random House. Stein says that his 54 fellow editors disagreed more sharply over obscenity than any other issue. Some words were finally left out, he says, "because people know what they mean and only look them up to see what we have to say about them." At that, only the single most obvious obscenity seems to be missing.

Donald Nelson? RHD will stand or fall in the long run on the strength of its scholarship. Some errors have already been spotted. In its dates section, the dictionary lists the naval hero killed at Trafalgar as "Lord Donald M. Nelson"; Lady Hamilton thought the name was Horatio, and Random House is confusing him with the World War II War Production Board chairman. Rumania is listed as an ally of the World War I Dual Alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary; it was not, but Bulgaria was.

Editor Stein and his legions of consulting specialists are hopeful that few other errors will turn up. After all, Random House used four computers in compiling the book.

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