From one of the world’s most beloved and bestselling authors, a terrifically useful and readable guide to the problems of the English language most commonly encountered by editors and writers. What is the singular form of graffiti? From what mythological figure is the word “tantalize” derived? One of the English language’s most skilled writers guides us all toward precise, mistake-free usage. Covering spelling, capitalization, plurals, hyphens, abbreviations, and foreign names and phrases, Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors will be an indispensable companion for all who care enough about our language not to maul, misuse, or contort it. As Bill Bryson notes, “English is a dazzlingly idiosyncratic tongue, full of quirks and irregularities that often seem willfully at odds with logic and common sense.” This dictionary is an essential guide to the wonderfully disordered thing that is the English language.

The New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors is the essential A to Z guide for everyone who works with words. Drawing on the expertise of the Oxford Dictionaries department, it provides authoritative advice on those words and names which raise questions time after time because ofspelling, capitalization, hyphenation, and cultural or historical context. As well as lexical terms, there are many proper names included: from place names and personal names to names of institutions, literary references, and books of the Bible. Entries give full coverage of recommended spellings,variant forms, confusable words, hyphenation, capitalization, foreign and specialist terms, proper names, and abbreviations.It is an essential tool for writers, editors, publishers, journalists, and web editors, and together with New Hart's Rules and the New Oxford Spelling Dictionary forms the complete editorial reference set.

The New Oxford Spelling Dictionary is a brand-new text, designed to offer both a quick reference for spelling and also an authoritative guide to recommended word breaks for line endings in printed text, whether on paper or in electronic form. Based on the latest Oxford Dictionaries' research, this text gives unambiguous guidance on spelling and form, including capitalization, hyphenation of compounds, UK and US spelling, and irregular inflections. It is an essential part of every writer's and editor's toolkit.

Small in size yet big enough to have the answers to readers' word worries, this miniature reference contains over 35,000 words, with difficult plurals and parts of verbs spelled out in full.

This book will tell all you need to know about British English spelling. It's a reference work intended for anyone interested in the English language, especially those who teach it, whatever the age or mother tongue of their students. It will be particularly useful to those wishing to produce well-designed materials for teaching initial literacy via phonics, for teaching English as a foreign or second language, and for teacher training. English spelling is notoriously complicated and difficult to learn; it is correctly described as much less regular and predictable than any other alphabetic orthography. However, there is more regularity in the English spelling system than is generally appreciated. This book provides, for the first time, a thorough account of the whole complex system. It does so by describing how phonemes relate to graphemes and vice versa. It enables searches for particular words, so that one can easily find, not the meanings or pronunciations of words, but the other words with which those with unusual phoneme-grapheme/grapheme-phoneme correspondences keep company. Other unique features of this book include teacher-friendly lists of correspondences and various regularities not described by previous authorities, for example the strong tendency for the letter-name vowel phonemes (the names of the letters ) to be spelt with those single letters in non-final syllables.

A Spelling Dictionary is a resource and reference tool for independent writers that provides indispensable resources for beginning writers, and builds research and writing skills.