Recommendations from our site
“In the United States it is considered, among publishing companies, to be the dictionary of record. What I mean by that is that if you go into the offices of a publishing company, you are not going to see various dictionaries on people’s bookshelves as you take a tour. Everybody is just going to have Merriam-Webster’s. I chose it because I felt there needs to be a dictionary on this list of five books because dictionaries are fundamental. A lot of people criticise Merriam-Webster’s because it is not necessarily clear – just because a word is in the dictionary, it doesn’t mean you should use it. For example, Merriam-Webster’s includes the word ‘irregardless.’ You might come back to me and say: ‘Irregardless is not a word. It is a duplicative of regardless. It is a ridiculous word.’ But I will respond, ‘Yes, it is a word. I just used it.’ It doesn’t mean that it is a good word, but it exists. There are a lot of things in this world that we wish didn’t exist but they do, and ‘irregardless’ is one of them.” Read more...
The Best Grammar and Punctuation Books
Mark Nichol, Linguist
Our most recommended books
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Garner's Modern English Usage (5th edition)
by Bryan A. Garner -
The Corner
by David Simon and Edward Burns -
The Scholar's Daughter
by Beatrice Harraden -
The F-Word
by Jesse Sheidlower -
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
by Oxford University Press -
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage
by Merriam-Webster
