A Dictionary of Modern English Usage


A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler, is an English usage dictionary. It details the usage of selected words, morphemes, phrases, word classes, punctuation, and various other rules and word features. The 1926 first edition remains in print, along with the 1965 second edition, which was edited by Sir Ernest Gowers, and was reprinted in 1983 and 1987. The 1996 third edition, re-titled The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, and revised in 2004, was mostly rewritten by Robert W. Burchfield and incorporated corpus linguistics data. The 2015 fourth edition, re-titled Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, was edited by Jeremy Butterfield. Informally, readers refer to the style guide and dictionary as Fowler's Modern English Usage, Fowler, and Fowler's.

Linguistic approach

In the entry on only, Fowler rails against "pedants" who demand that the adverb always be placed directly before that which it qualifies. In his view these linguistic prescriptivists were "turning English into an exact science or an automatic machine".
Likewise, certain grammar rules are denigrated by Fowler. Of the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition:
Those who lay down the universal principle that final prepositions are "inelegant" are unconsciously trying to deprive the English language of a valuable idiomatic resource, which has been used freely by all our greatest writers except those whose instinct for English idiom has been overpowered by notions of correctness derived from Latin standards… In respect of elegance or inelegance, every example must be judged not by any arbitrary rule, but on its own merits, according to the impression it makes on the feeling of educated English readers.

Fowler did not believe that English could be formulated by intellectuals. To his mind, "what grammarians say should be has perhaps less influence on what shall be than even the more modest of them realize."
Nevertheless, Fowler himself not only describes the English usage of his time, but also makes his own taste known. Of archaisms, he writes "archaic words thrust into a commonplace context to redeem its ordinariness are an abomination."

Editions

20th century

Before writing A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Henry W. Fowler and his younger brother, Francis George Fowler, wrote and revised The King's English, a grammar and usage guide. Assisted in the research by Francis, who died in 1918 of tuberculosis contracted whilst serving with the British Expeditionary Force in the First World War, Henry dedicated the first edition of the Dictionary to his late brother:
The first edition of the dictionary was published in 1926, and then was reprinted with corrections in 1930, 1937, 1954, and in 2009 with an introduction and commentary by the linguist David Crystal. The second edition, titled Fowler's Modern English Usage, was published in 1965, revised and edited by Ernest Gowers. Gowers largely preserved the original, citing Randolph Quirk's comment on the first edition: "Modern English Usage is personal: it is Fowler".
The third edition, The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, was published in 1996, edited by Robert Burchfield. While Fowler had focused only on British English, Burchfield broadened the dictionary to include American English and English spoken in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and elsewhere.
The Pocket Fowler's Modern English Usage, edited by the lexicographer Robert Allen, is an abridgement of Burchfield's 1996 edition. It was produced by omitting about half the entries and reducing the length of others. A second edition of Allen's Pocket Fowler was published in 2008, the content of which the publisher said "harks back to the original 1926 edition".

21st century

The fourth edition, Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, was published in 2015, edited by Jeremy Butterfield. This edition saw over 250 new entries added to the dictionary. Butterfield made use of the Oxford English Corpus to gather data about the frequency of various spellings, differences in usage of similar words, relative frequencies of words in different varieties of English, and malapropisms and misspellings. The World Wide Web facilitated his access to this and other online resources.
On the tension between descriptivism and prescriptivism involved in compliling a usage dictionary, Butterfield claims that while he favours descriptivism "as a lexicographer and editor", he has his own personal preferences; "Fowler would not be Fowler without them."

Other works on English Usage