A Dictionary of Modern English Usage - Editions

Editions

Before writing A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Henry Fowler and his younger brother, Francis George Fowler (1871–1918), wrote and revised The King's English (1906), a grammar and usage guide later superseded by this book in the 1930s. Moreover, he researched the Dictionary assisted by Francis, who died in 1918 of tuberculosis, which he contracted in service with the British Expeditionary Force in the First World War (1914–1918). Fowler thus dedicated the Dictionary to his brother, Francis George:

I think of it as it should have been, with its prolixities docked, its dullnesses enlivened, its fads eliminated, its truths multiplied . . . 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 A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) was much reprinted; thus, a reprint wherein the copyright page indicates 1954, as the most recent reprinting year, also notes that the 1930 and 1937 reprintings were "with corrections". The second edition, Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1965) was revised by Sir Ernest Gowers, who updated the text, contributed entries, and deleted articles "no longer relevant to literary fashions". For the twenty-first century, the third edition, The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1996), was revised and published as Fowler’s Modern English Usage (2004), the editor of which, Robert Burchfield, in the preface acknowledges that, while "Fowler’s name remains on the title-page . . . his book has been largely rewritten."

Historically, the substantive and editorial differences among the first-edition and the third-edition versions is that the former, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), is a prescriptive style guide to clear and expressive writing, whilst the latter versions, The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1996) and Fowler’s Modern English Usage (2004), are descriptive usage guides to spoken and written English. The 2009 reprinting of the 1926 first edition contains an introduction and entries updated by the linguist David Crystal.

• Fowler, Henry Watson (1926). A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1st ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. OCLC 318492.
• Fowler, Henry Watson (1965). Fowler's Modern English Usage. Edited by Sir Ernest Gowers (2nd ed.). Great Britain: Oxford University Press. OCLC 318483.
• Burchfield, Robert William (1996). The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-869126-2. OCLC 36063311.

• Burchfield, Robert William (2004). Fowler's Modern English Usage (Revised 3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-861021-2. OCLC 56767410.
• Fowler, Henry Watson (2009). A Dictionary of Modern English Usage: The Classic First Edition. Introduction and notes by David Crystal. Great Britain: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-953534-7.