The Hutchinson Dictionary of Difficult Words

Preface

The general dictionaries which we all have on our bookshelves and desks, andwhich we constantly consult, have one significant but little-consideredcharacteristic in common: much of their contents is never used. When was thelast time you needed to find out the meaning of

the

but

, the spelling of

cat

dog

? And yet dictionaries compiled for adult native-speakers of English take careto include such straightforward words, which present no difficulty to dictionaryusers, and which consequently are seldom – if ever – looked up. As dictionariesdescend the ladder of size past 'concise' to 'pocket', it is the less frequent andless familiar words that are omitted; the ones we all know are allowed to stay.We rather take this feature of dictionaries for granted, as if that is how theyhave always been, and therefore that is how they should always be. But that is

not

how they have always been. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the commonesttype of lexical reference book was one that included only those words that mightpresent some difficulty to the user, through unfamiliarity, orthographicirregularity, etc. These are termed 'hard-word dictionaries'. But in the 18thcentury, the practice began to grow of including more everyday words as well.Confirmed by Dr Johnson's magisterial

English Dictionary

of 1755, this is thetradition that has won out: we now assume that dictionaries will be inventoriesof all the words of a language.However, even the huge

Oxford English Dictionary

would not seriously make thatclaim. No dictionary, however big, can be a hundred percent comprehensive –much less a pocket dictionary. As far as the practical needs of users areconcerned, it makes much better sense to include only words that they are likelyto look up. The space saved by omitting the likes of

and

house

, and

small

can be much more profitably given to words whose meaning, spelling,pronunciation, etc. cause problems.That is the idea behind

The Hutchinson Dictionary of Difficult Words

. It is acompendium of around 14,000 of the more troublesome and obscure words in theEnglish language. It gives you access to the farthest reaches of Englishvocabulary, including within its modest compass terms that can otherwise befound only in the largest multi-volume unabridged dictionaries and specialistreference books. It is not a dictionary to be left on the shelf, but a practicalproblem-solver whose every entry serves a purpose.© Copyright Research Machines plc 2006. All rights reserved. Helicon Publishing isa division of Research Machines plc.Helicon Publishing