Oxford Index Browse

Over 4,500 entries

‘offers impeccable advice’ - Sally Baker, The Times

This invaluable quick-reference work, based on the latest edition of the renowned Fowler’s Concise Dictionary of Modern English Usage, offers the best available advice on English usage in an accessible quick-reference format. Drawing on the unrivalled resources of Oxford’s English Dictionaries language monitoring programme, it provides clear, practical and up-to-date guidance on questions of grammar, spelling, style, and word choice. Jeremy Butterfield has judiciously revised the text to reflect the usage practices and concerns of the 21^st century.

‘offers impeccable advice’ – The Times

Over 6,000 entries

This world-famous guide to the English language has been cherished and consulted by writers, editors, academics, and anyone who values good writing, for its practical and reasoned guidance on grammar, style, punctuation, spelling, and word choice since it first appeared in 1926. The new edition – the first in 18 years – has been thoroughly but sensitively revised to reflect English usage in the 21st century, and offers a clear, authoritative, and enlightening picture of the English we use today.

International in scope, the Dictionary provides in-depth coverage of both British and American English usage, with reference also to the English of Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, and South Africa. The entries are packed with usage examples, some from established literary figures such as Chinua Achebe, Raymond Carver, Iris Murdoch, Harold Pinter, and Vikram Seth, and others from a vast range of newspapers, journals, books, broadcast material, websites, and other digital sources from across the globe, and include references to topical personalities such as Stephen Fry, Prince Harry, Jeremy Paxman, and Wayne Rooney.

Based on the evidence and research of the Oxford Dictionaries Programme, this is the most comprehensive and authoritative guide to usage available.

Over 6000 entries

With more than a thousand new entries and more than 2,300 word-frequency ratios, the magisterial fourth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage reflects usage lexicography at its finest. It delights while providing instruction on skillful, persuasive, and vivid writing. Garner liberates English from two extremes: both from the hidebound “purists” who mistakenly believe that split infinitives and sentence-ending prepositions are malfeasances and from the linguistic relativists who believe that whatever people say or write must necessarily be accepted.

The judgments here are backed up not just by a lifetime of study but also by an empirical grounding in the largest linguistic corpus ever available. In this fourth edition, Garner has made extensive use of corpus linguistics to include ratios of standard terms as compared against variants in modern print sources. No other resource provides as comprehensive, reliable, and empirical a guide to current English usage.

For all concerned with writing and editing, Garner’s Modern English Usage will prove invaluable as a desk reference. Garner illustrates with actual examples, cited with chapter and verse, all the linguistic blunders that modern writers and speakers are prone to, whether in word choice, syntax, phrasing, punctuation, or pronunciation. This is the liveliest and most compulsively readable reference work for writers of our time.

Over 1,600 entries

A straightforward and accessible A-Z guide to the diverse and often complex terminology of English grammar. Includes clear and concise definitions which are enhanced by numerous example sentences, as well as relevant quotations from the scholarly literature of the field.

This second edition is written and edited by Professor Bas Aarts of University College London, writer of the acclaimed Oxford Modern English Grammar. It has been fully revised and updated, with particular attention paid to refreshing the example sentences included within the text. There are over 150 new entries that cover current terminology which has arisen since the publication of the first edition, and there are also new entries on the most important English grammars published since the start of the 20th century. Hundreds of new cross-references enhance the user-friendly nature of the text, and the list of works cited has been thoroughly updated to reflect the current state of the field.

All in all, this Dictionary is an invaluable guide to English grammar for all students and teachers of the subject, as well as all those with an informed interest in the English language.

What is the singular of 'paparazzi'? Is 'graffiti' singular or plural? Should I say 'empathic' or 'empathetic'? What is the correct pronunciation of 'concierge'?

In this book of crisp, precise and often witty pronouncements on modern American English, Bryan Garner decisively answers these and hundreds of other questions that bedevil those who care about the language. Garner draws on a host of evidence to support his judgements, citing thousands of examples - good, bad, and ugly - from sources such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek.