Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships

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The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships (DANFS for short) is the primary reference work for the basic facts about every ship ever used by the United States Navy. Although called a "dictionary", it is more accurately described as a specialized encyclopedia. In addition to the primary ship articles, DANFS includes appendices on small craft, histories of Confederate Navy ships, and various essays related to naval ships. The DANFS is published by the Navy's Naval Historical Center and is available in book and web form.

1 Publication data
2 Reference use
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Publication data

*Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships* Volumes
Volume	Date Published	Ships	Notes
I	1959	A-B	Out of print
II	1963	C-F
III	1968	G-K
IV	1969	L-M
V	1970	N-Q
VI	1976	R-S
VII	1981	T-Z
I-A	1991	A
Hazegray		A-Z	Ship histories end at dates above
Naval Historical Center		A-Z	Ship histories being brought up to date

The Dictionary was originally published in seven bound volumes, ordered by ship name, from 1959 (A-B) to 1981 (T-Z). In 1991 a revised Volume I, covering only ship names beginning with A was released. Since the 1959 A-B volume was out of print, ships histories starting with B were hard to find.

Initially only available as a hardcopy reference work, volunteers at the Hazegray website undertook to transcribe the Dictionary and make it available on the World Wide Web. The project goal is a direct transcription of the DANFS, with changes limited to correcting typograpical errors and editorial notes for incorrect facts in the original. Subsequently, the Naval Historical Center (NHC) has developed an online version of DANFS using a combination of optical character recognition (OCR) and hand transcription; the quality is generally good, although errors still occur throughout. The NHC is slowly updating the online DANFS to correct errors and take into account the gap in time between its publication and the present date. NHC is prioritizing the updates as follows: ships currently in commission, ships that came into commission after the volume (missing), ships decommissioned after the volume (incomplete), and finally updates to older ships.^[1] The NHC has begun a related project to place Ship History and Command Operations Reports online at their DANFS site. See below for links to these resources.

[edit] Reference use

Because the Dictionary's text is public domain, being a work of the U.S. Government, its articles are often quoted verbatim in other works. Many websites organized by former and active crew members of US Naval vessels will have a copy of their ship's DANFS article posted. Editors of Wikipedia often use the DANFS entry as a starting point for ship articles (e.g. USS Lanier). Those Wikipedia articles using DANFS text give credit by including the following citation:

"This article includes text from the public domain Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships."