/dictionaries/

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What dictionaries or style guides would you recommend and why?

>The occasion for this article is Oxford University Press's semi-recent release of Bryan A. Garner'sA Dictionary of Modern American Usage. The fact of the matter is that Garner's dictionary is extremely good, certainly the most comprehensive usage guide since E. W. Gilman'sWebster's Dictionary of English Usage, now a decade out of date.[1] Its format, like that of Gilman and the handful of other great American usage guides of the last century, includes entries on individual words and phrases and expostulative small-cap MINI-ESSAYS. on any issue broad enough to warrant more general discussion. But the really distinctive and ingenious features ofA Dictionary of Modern American Usageinvolve issues of rhetoric and ideology and style, and it is impossible to describe why these issues are important and why Garner's management of them borders on genius without talking about the historical contexts [2] in which ADMAU appears, and this context turns out to be a veritable hurricane of controversies involving everything from technical linguistics to public education to political ideology, and these controversies take a certain amount of time to unpack before their relation to what makes Garner's usage guide so eminently worth your hard-earned reference-book dollar can even be established; and in fact there's no way even to begin the whole harrowing polymeric discussion without taking a moment to establish and define the highly colloquial term SNOOT.
-- DFW