When was the first Random House dictionary published?
Random House published its first dictionary project, Clarence Barnhart's American College Dictionary, in 1947. This early work relied primarily on The New Century Dictionary.
Random House published its first dictionary project, Clarence Barnhart's American College Dictionary, in 1947. This early work relied primarily on The New Century Dictionary.
The result appeared in 1966 as The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: The Unabridged Edition. It contained 315,000 entries spread across 2256 pages and included 2400 illustrations.
Editors built a dataset containing a 25,000,000-word corpus to drive the project. This massive collection of words allowed the team to analyze usage patterns systematically.
An expanded second edition edited by Stuart Berg Flexner appeared in 1987. Editors revised that version again in 1993 to update content further.
A CD-ROM version released in 1994 included 120,000 spoken pronunciations for users. Digital formats transformed how people accessed definitions and pronunciation guides.