Recommendations from our site
“Yes, it’s a dictionary too, but also a grammar guide: disputed usages like whether ‘like’ can be a conjunction (‘Tastes good like a cigarette should’) are included. AHD takes a unique approach: a ‘Usage Panel’ with a hundred members, well-known editors, writers and language people (and, full disclosure, not so well-known me) vote on whether a usage is acceptable. This is a kind of conservative but also radically descriptive approach: ‘73% of our hand-picked experts say that this is OK; that’s up from 64% in our last edition.’ The names of the Usage Panel are printed in the frontmatter, so you know exactly whose advice you’re following.” Read more...
Grammar Books That Prove What They Preach
Lane Greene, Journalist
Our most recommended books
-
Garner's Modern English Usage (5th edition)
by Bryan A. Garner -
The Sense of Style
by Steven Pinker -
The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation
by Jane Straus -
The Copyeditor's Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communications
by Amy Einsohn -
Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary
by K. M. Elisabeth Murray -
A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words
by John Camden Hotten