Webster's New World Dictionary

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Compact school and office edition, 1967

Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language is an American dictionary first published in 1951 and presently published by John Wiley & Sons.

The first edition was published by the World Publishing Company of Cleveland, Ohio in two volumes or one large volume, including a large encyclopedic section. In 1953, World published a one-volume college edition, without the encyclopedic material. It was edited by Joseph H. Friend and David B. Guralnik and contained 142,000 entries, said to be the largest American desk dictionary available at the time.

The second college edition, edited by Guralnik, was published in 1970. World Publishing was acquired by Simon and Schuster in 1980 and they continued the work with a third edition in 1989 edited by Victoria Neufeldt. A fourth edition was published in 1998 and contains 160,000 entries.

One of the salient features of Webster's New World dictionaries has been an unusualy full etymology, that is, the origin and development of words and the relationship of words to other Indo-European languages. The work also labels words which have a distinctly American origin.

Circa 2000, Simon and Schuster sold the work to the John Wiley publishing company. The college edition is the official desk dictionary of The New York Times and the Associated Press.

Although the title refers to Noah Webster, the work is unrelated to the series of Webster's dictionaries published by the Merriam-Webster Company, which indeed are descended directly from Noah Webster's original publications. By contrast, Webster's New World Dictionary merely cites Webster as a generic name for any American English dictionary, as does Random House's line of Webster's Dictionaries.

Webster's New World student and children's dictionaries are of particular interest to young readers.