The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia was one of the largest and most highly regarded
encyclopedic dictionariesAn encyclopedic dictionary typically includes a large number of short listings, arranged alphabetically, and discussing a wide range of topics. Encyclopedic dictionaries can be general, containing articles on topics in many different fields; or they can specialize in a particular field...
of the English language. The first edition was published from 1889 to 1891 by
The Century CompanyThe Century Company was an American publishing company, founded in 1881.It was originally a subsidiary of Charles Scribner's Sons, but was bought and renamed. The magazine it had published up to that time, Scribners Monthly, was renamed The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine.The Century Company...
of New York, in six, eight, or ten volume versions (originally issued in 24
fascicleA fascicle is a bundle or a cluster.Fascicle may also refer to:In anatomy:* Muscle fascicle, a bundle of skeletal muscle fibers surrounded by connective tissue* Nerve fascicle,a larger bundle of axons enclosed by the perineurium...
s) in 7,046 pages with some 10,000 wood-engraved illustrations. It was edited by Sanskrit scholar and linguist
William Dwight WhitneyWilliam Dwight Whitney was an American linguist, philologist, and lexicographer who edited The Century Dictionary.Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, February 9, 1827. He entered Williams College at fifteen, graduating in 1845...
, with
Benjamin Eli SmithBenjamin Eli Smith, L.H.D. was an American editor, son of Eli Smith, born at Beirut, Ottoman Empire . He graduated at Amherst College , which gave him the degree of L.H.D. in 1902...
's assistance.
The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia was one of the largest and most highly regarded
encyclopedic dictionariesAn encyclopedic dictionary typically includes a large number of short listings, arranged alphabetically, and discussing a wide range of topics. Encyclopedic dictionaries can be general, containing articles on topics in many different fields; or they can specialize in a particular field...
of the English language. The first edition was published from 1889 to 1891 by
The Century CompanyThe Century Company was an American publishing company, founded in 1881.It was originally a subsidiary of Charles Scribner's Sons, but was bought and renamed. The magazine it had published up to that time, Scribners Monthly, was renamed The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine.The Century Company...
of New York, in six, eight, or ten volume versions (originally issued in 24
fascicleA fascicle is a bundle or a cluster.Fascicle may also refer to:In anatomy:* Muscle fascicle, a bundle of skeletal muscle fibers surrounded by connective tissue* Nerve fascicle,a larger bundle of axons enclosed by the perineurium...
s) in 7,046 pages with some 10,000 wood-engraved illustrations. It was edited by Sanskrit scholar and linguist
William Dwight WhitneyWilliam Dwight Whitney was an American linguist, philologist, and lexicographer who edited The Century Dictionary.Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, February 9, 1827. He entered Williams College at fifteen, graduating in 1845...
, with
Benjamin Eli SmithBenjamin Eli Smith, L.H.D. was an American editor, son of Eli Smith, born at Beirut, Ottoman Empire . He graduated at Amherst College , which gave him the degree of L.H.D. in 1902...
's assistance. It was a great expansion of the smaller
Imperial DictionaryThe Imperial Dictionary of the English Language - A Complete Encyclopedic Lexicon, Literary, Scientific, and Technological, edited by Rev. John Ogilvie , was an expansion of the 1841 second edition of Noah Webster's American Dictionary. It was published by W. G...
, which in turn had been based on the 1841 edition of
Noah WebsterNoah Webster was an American lexicographer, textbook author, spelling reformer, word enthusiast, and editor. He has been called the “Father of American Scholarship and Education.” His “Blue-Backed Speller” books were used to teach spelling and reading to five generations of American children...
's
American DictionaryWebster's Dictionary is the name given to a common type of English language dictionary in the United States. The name is derived from lexicographer Noah Webster and has become a genericized trademark for this type of dictionary....
.
After Whitney's death in 1894, supplementary volumes were published under Smith's supervision, including,
The Century Cyclopedia of Names (1894) and
The Century Atlas (1897). A two-volume
Supplement of new vocabulary, published in 1909, completed the dictionary. A reformatted edition,
The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, was published in 1911 in twelve quarto volumes: ten of vocabulary, plus the volume of names and the atlas. This set went through several printings, the last in 1914. The same year, the ten vocabulary volumes were published as one giant volume, about 8500 pages in a very thin paper. The now much coveted
India paperIndia paper is a type of paper which from 1875 has been based on bleached hemp and rag fibres, that produced a very thin, tough opaque white paper. It has a basis weight of 20 pounds, yet bulks 1,000 pages to the inch....
edition also appeared around this time, usually in 5 double volumes (rarely, in 10 single volumes) plus one additional for the Cyclopedia.
The completed dictionary contained over 500,000 entries, more than
Webster's New International or
Funk and Wagnalls New StandardFunk & Wagnalls is a publisher based in New York City known for its reference works, including an encyclopedia, content from which became a part of Microsoft's Encarta digital encyclopedia.-History:...
, the largest other dictionaries of the period. Each form of a word was treated separately, and liberal numbers of quotations and additional information were included to support the definitions. In its
etymologiesEtymology is the study of the history of words and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages, and texts about the languages, to gather knowledge about how words were used at earlier stages, and...
,
GreekGreek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical...
wordA word is the smallest free form in a language, in contrast to a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning. A word may consist of only one morpheme , but a single morpheme may not be able to exist as a free form A word is the smallest free form (an item that may be uttered in isolation with...
s were not
transliteratedTransliteration is the practice of converting a text from one writing system into another in a systematic way.-Definitions:From an information-theoretical point of view, transliteration is a mapping from one system of writing into another, word by word, or ideally letter by letter...
.
Although the dictionary was never again revised or expanded, an abridged edition with new words,
The New Century Dictionary (edited by H.G. Emery and K.G. Brewster; revision editor, Catherine B. Avery,) was published by Appleton-Century-Crofts of New York in 1927, and reprinted in various forms for over thirty-five years. The
New Century became the basis for the
American College DictionaryThe American College Dictionary was the first Random House dictionary and was later expanded to create the Random House Dictionary of the English Language. First published in 1947, The American College Dictionary was edited by Clarence Barnhart based on the 1927 New Century Dictionary....
, the first Random House dictionary, in 1947. The three volume
New Century Cyclopedia of Names, an expansion of the 1894 volume, was published in 1954, edited by
Clarence BarnhartClarence Lewis Barnhart was an American lexicographer best known for writing the Thorndike-Barnhart series of graded dictionaries, which were based on word lists developed by psychological theorist Edward Thorndike....
.
The
Century Dictionary was admired for the quality of its entries, the craftsmanship in its design,
typographyTypography is the art and technique of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyphs. Type glyphs are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques...
, and
bindingBookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book from a number of folded or unfolded sheets of paper or other material. It also usually involves attaching covers to the resulting text-block.- History :...
, and its excellent illustrations. It has been used as an information source for the makers of many later dictionaries, including editors of the
Oxford English DictionaryThe Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press , is a comprehensive dictionary of the English language...
, who cited it over 2,000 times in the first edition. In 1913, Stewart Archer Steger from the University of Virginia published his Ph.D. dissertation "American Dictionaries" and devoted a 14-page Chapter VI on
Century Dictionary. He concluded the chapter with these words: "Altogether,
The Century Dictionary far surpasses anything in American lexicography".
External links
The complete
Century Dictionary is
in image form, where it can be searched by the word or viewed by the page in its original form, with zoom-in option. It is also available
in full-text form at
Wordnik.