The
Random House publishing company entered the
reference book market after World War II. They acquired rights to the
Century Dictionary and the
Dictionary of American English, both out of print. Their first dictionary was
Clarence Barnhart's
American College Dictionary, published in 1947, and based primarily on
The New Century Dictionary, an abridgment of the
Century. In the late 1950s, it was decided to publish an expansion of the
American College Dictionary, which had been modestly updated with each reprinting since its publication. Under editors Jess Stein and
Laurence Urdang, they augmented the
American College Dictionary with large numbers of entries in all fields, primarily proper names, and published it in 1966 as
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: The Unabridged Edition. It was the first dictionary to use computers in its compilation and
typesetting. The dataset for compiling the dictionary contained a 25,000,000-word corpus. In his preface to the 1966 edition, Stein wrote (p. vi) that the
Random House Dictionary steers "a linguistically sound middle course" between the "lexicographer's
Scylla and Charybdis: should the dictionary be an authoritarian guide to 'correct' English or should it be so antiseptically free of comment that it may defeat the user by providing him with no guidance at all?" In 1982 Random House published The Random House ProofReader, a computer
spell checker based on its dictionary. An expanded second edition of the printed dictionary, edited by
Stuart Berg Flexner, appeared in 1987, revised in 1993. This edition adopted the
Merriam-Webster Collegiate practice of adding dates for the entry of words into the language. Unlike the
Collegiate, which cited the date of the first known citation,
Random House indicated a range of dates. For example, where the
Collegiate gave 1676,
Random House might offer 1670–80. This second edition was described as permissive by in the
Washington Post. Random House incorporated the name ''Webster's'' into the dictionary's title after an appeals court overturned an injunction awarded to
Merriam Webster restricting the name's use. The name ''Random House Webster's'' is now used on many Random House publications. In 2001, Random House published its ''Webster's Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language
, based on the Second Edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language''. Versions of the dictionary have been published under other names, including ''Webster's New Universal Dictionary
(which was previously the name of an entirely different dictionary), Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary
, and Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language''.
Dictionary.coms online dictionary bases its proprietary content on the
Random House unabridged version. ==See also==