A Dictionary of Modern English Usage
Style guide by Henry Watson Fowler
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage
The title page of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926)
AuthorH. W. Fowler
LanguageEnglish
Published1926
PublisherOxford University Press
Publication placeUnited Kingdom
OCLC815620926

A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), by H. W. Fowler (1858–1933), is an English usage dictionary. It details the usage of selected words, morphemes, phrases, word classes, punctuation, and various other rules and word features. The 1926 first edition remains in print, along with the 1965 second edition, which was edited by Sir Ernest Gowers, and was reprinted in 1983 and 1987. The 1996 third edition, re-titled The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, and revised in 2004, was mostly rewritten by Robert W. Burchfield and incorporated corpus linguistics data.[1] The 2015 fourth edition, re-titled Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, was edited by Jeremy Butterfield. Informally, readers refer to the style guide and dictionary as Fowler's Modern English Usage, Fowler, and Fowler's.

Linguistic approach

In the entry on only, Fowler rails against "pedants" who demand that the adverb always be placed directly before that which it qualifies ("he died only a week ago" rather than "he only died a week ago"). In his view these linguistic prescriptivists were "turning English into an exact science or an automatic machine".[2]

Likewise, certain grammar rules are denigrated by Fowler. Of the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition:[3]

Those who lay down the universal principle that final prepositions are "inelegant" are unconsciously trying to deprive the English language of a valuable idiomatic resource, which has been used freely by all our greatest writers except those whose instinct for English idiom has been overpowered by notions of correctness derived from Latin standards… In respect of elegance or inelegance, every example must be judged not by any arbitrary rule, but on its own merits, according to the impression it makes on the feeling of educated English readers.

Fowler did not believe that English was capable of being formulated by academics. To his mind "what grammarians say should be has perhaps less influence on what shall be than even the more modest of them realize."[4]

Nevertheless, Fowler himself not only describes the English usage of his time, but also makes his own taste known. Of archaisms, he writes "archaic words thrust into a commonplace context to redeem its ordinariness are an abomination."[5]

Editions

Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage

20th century

Before writing A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Henry W. Fowler and his younger brother, Francis George Fowler (1871–1918), wrote and revised The King's English (1906), a grammar and usage guide. Assisted in the research by Francis, who died in 1918 of tuberculosis contracted (1915–16) whilst serving with the British Expeditionary Force in the First World War (1914–1918), Henry dedicated the first edition of the Dictionary to his late brother:[6]

I think of it as it should have been, with its prolixities docked, its dullnesses enlivened, its fads eliminated, its truths multiplied. He had a nimbler wit, a better sense of proportion, and a more open mind, than his twelve-year-older partner; and it is a matter of regret that we had not, at a certain point, arranged our undertakings otherwise than we did. ... This present book accordingly contains none of his actual writing; but, having been designed in consultation with him, it is the last fruit of a partnership that began in 1903 with our translation of Lucian.

The first edition of the dictionary was published in 1926, and then was reprinted with corrections in 1930, 1937, 1954, and in 2009, with an introduction and commentary by the linguist David Crystal. The second edition, titled Fowler's Modern English Usage, was published in 1965, revised and edited by Ernest Gowers. Gowers largely preserved the original, citing Randolph Quirk's comment on the first edition: "Modern English Usage is personal: it is Fowler".[7]

The third edition, The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, was published in 1996, edited by Robert Burchfield. While Fowler had focused only on British English, Burchfield broadened the dictionary to include American English and English spoken in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and elsewhere.[8]

The Pocket Fowler's Modern English Usage (1999), edited by the lexicographer Robert Allen, is an abridgement of Burchfield's 1996 edition. It was produced by omitting about half the entries and reducing the length of others.[9] A second edition of Allen's Pocket Fowler was published in 2008, the content of which the publisher said "harks back to the original 1926 edition".[10]

21st century

The fourth edition, Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, was published in 2015, edited by Jeremy Butterfield. This edition saw over 250 new entries added to the dictionary. Butterfield made use of the Oxford English Corpus to gather data about the frequency of various spellings, differences in usage of similar words (via word associations), relative frequencies of words in different varieties of English, and malapropisms and misspellings. The World Wide Web facilitated his access to this and other online resources.[11]

On the tension between descriptivism and prescriptivism involved in compliling a usage dictionary, Butterfield claims that while he favours descriptivism "as a lexicographer and editor", he has his own personal preferences; "Fowler would not be Fowler without them."[12]

See also

Other works on English Usage

Notes

  1. ^ Burchfield 1996, p. xi.
  2. ^ Fowler 1965, p. 419.
  3. ^ Fowler 1965, p. 474.
  4. ^ Fowler 1965, p. 625.
  5. ^ Fowler 1965, p. 34.
  6. ^ Fowler 1965, p. xiii.
  7. ^ Morton, Herbert C. (1998). "Burchfield on Usage: Remaking Fowler's Classic". American Speech. 73 (3). doi:10.2307/455828.
  8. ^ Morton 1998.
  9. ^ Allen 1999, p. v.
  10. ^ Allen 2008.
  11. ^ Butterfield 2015, p. viii.
  12. ^ Butterfield 2015, p. x.

Bibliography

Editions of the Dictionary

Other works

  • Fowler, Henry; Winchester, Simon (introduction) (2003 reprint). A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford Language Classics Series). Oxford Press. ISBN 0-19-860506-4.
  • Nicholson, Margaret (1957). A Dictionary of American-English Usage Based on Fowler's Modern English Usage. Signet, by arrangement with Oxford University Press.
  • Yagoda, Ben. "Don't Say It Like That: A Legendary Usage Guide is Turning a Hundred". The New Yorker, September 29, 2025, pp. 54-59. Published online as "The Autocrat of English Usage"
  • A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. 1926 ed. (1961 Reprint) on Internet Archive
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