This is the third English Dictionary which the present Editor has prepared, and he may therefore lay claim to an unusually prolonged apprenticeship to his trade. It is surely unnecessary for him to say that he believes this to be the best book of the three, and he can afford to rest content if the Courteous Reader receive it with the indulgence extended to his Library Dictionary, published in the spring of 1898. It is based upon that work, but will be found to possess many serviceable qualities of its own. It is not much less in content, and its greater relative portability is due to smaller type, to thinner paper, and still more to a rigorous compression and condensation in the definitions, by means of which room has been found for many additional words. The aim has been to include all the common words in literary and conversational English, together with words obsolete save in the pages of Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Authorised Version of the Bible. An attempt has been made also to include the common terms of the sciences and the arts of life, the vocabulary of sport, those Scotch and provincial words which assert themselves in Burns, Scott, the Brontës, and George Eliot, and even the coinages of word-masters like Carlyle, Browning, and Meredith. Numberless compound idiomatic phrases have also been given a place, in each case under the head of the significant word.

EDITED BY REV. THOMAS DAVIDSON ASSISTANT-EDITOR OF 'CHAMBERS'S ENCYCLOPÆDIA' EDITOR OF 'CHAMBERS'S ENGLISH DICTIONARY Since there are many other updated English dictionaries online and otherwise in the digital form, downloading this dictionary of the yesteryears might not be of any use as a means to find the meaning of English words. However to those who would like to know the whereabouts of the pristine-English that was there in pristine-England, this dictionary would be an ideal possession. It was an age when many English letters came in various combined form - the so-called Alphabetic ligatures. Another mentionable item would be insights that can be had on what were original meanings of various English words. There are so-many words whose meaning has altered much over the past few years and decades.