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A Bibliography for Copy Editors

Last update: June 2, 2000

Copyright notice: This page and all its contents are copyright © 2000 by Melinda J. McAdams and may not be reproduced in any form for any reason.

This is a U.S.-oriented list of reference books that I consider useful for copy editors and wordsmiths in general. You can buy most of them from Amazon.com, an online bookstore, by following the title links. I have used all these books, some of them extensively. An experienced copy editor (I was one, full-time, for eleven years) probably knows more about dictionaries than anyone else who isn't a professional lexicographer. I know we know more about grammar and usage than any English teacher alive, and if we don't know it, we know where to look it up.


In this document:

Dictionaries and Related Resources

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Never use a paperback dictionary. Don't ask why, just don't. If editing is your job, you should buy a real dictionary.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd Edition
Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1992. Hardcover. This handsome and well-regarded dictionary is bigger than a college dictionary but smaller than an unabridged. As far as I can tell, it's not widely used as the house dictionary at many publishing concerns. Nice pictures!

The Barnhart Dictionary Companion (journal)
Produced by Lexik House (Hyde Park, N.Y.) and available from Merriam-Webster Inc., 47 Federal Street, Springfield, MA 01102. One year subscription $98. More than 1,500 entries per year not in current dictionaries. Good for editors working for trendy magazines.

A Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (out of print)
Beale, Paul, ed. New York: Macmillan, 1990. A substantial update of Eric Partridge's 1937 classic. Try the Shorter Slang Dictionary, Fergusson, Partridge, Beale (eds.) Routledge, 1993.

[Web. 10] [Recommended]
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed. (called Web. 10)
Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1993, 1998. Hardcover, abridged; widely used in book publishing. A new edition appears roughly every ten years. This reasonably priced dictionary is, in my opinion, the best graduation gift for any high school student. (See also the Merriam-Webster Web site.)

The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition (called OED2)
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. This update of the 20-volume classic, the first complete revision since 1933, was greeted by a flurry of news articles and critical raves in 1989. Of course, not many organizations can afford this resource.

Webster's New World College Dictionary, 4th ed.
IDG Books Worldwide, 1999. Hardcover, abridged; the favorite at many newspapers because biographical and geographical entries are part of the main text.

Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (called Web. 3)
Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1986. Hardcover, unabridged (this is the BIG one for American English). A new edition is a major event; the third edition replaced the second in 1961, and the fourth edition is scheduled for publication in 2001. Although many people carry a 30-year-old grudge against this dictionary for its alleged permissiveness, it's actually the undisputed best (unless you can afford the OED2). There's also a CD-ROM edition.
For a fascinating history, read The Story of Webster's Third: Philip Gove's Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics, by Herbert C. Morton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Other Reliable References

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[AP Stylebook] [Recommended]
The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual
Associated Press, 2000. The best of the newspaper stylebooks (unless you're Canadian), in my opinion. Updated editions come out regularly. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times have also published their own stylebooks.

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
Bartlett, John. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992. A copy editor learns that she can never trust a writer to get a quotation right. Rely on Bartlett's. The CD-ROM version is really fun to use.

[Chicago Manual] The Chicago Manual of Style 14th ed.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. New editions come out infrequently. (I prefer Words Into Type, but there's been no new edition of that since 1974.) You'll need a book like this to guide you on typesetting style and the more complex aspects of formatting print, e.g. footnotes, bibliographies, mathematical equations, extracts, and citations.

[Recommended]
Dos, Don'ts & Maybes of English Usage
Bernstein, Theodore M. New York: Random House, 1999. This is a substitution for Bernstein's classic The Careful Writer: A Modern Guide to English Usage (New York: Atheneum, 1965; resissued 1977), which, along with Follett and Fowler, is one of the three most respected English usage guides and easily the friendliest of the three. Scout around in your local used-book stores. Dos, Don'ts & Maybes has much of the same content, but less of it.

Copy Editor: Language News for the Publishing Profession
Published six times a year by Copy Editor, P.O. Box 230604, Ansonia Station, New York, NY 10023-0604 USA. One year, $69; two years, $118. Packed with useful information.

The Editorial Eye
Published monthly by EEI Communications, 66 Canal Center Plaza, Suite 200, Alexandria, VA 22314-5507 USA. One year, $129 ($149 international).

Modern American Usage: A Guide (revised ed.)
Follett, Wilson. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998. One of the three classic usage guides (along with Bernstein's Careful Writer and Fowler).

A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 2nd Revised Edition
Fowler, H. W. London: Oxford University Press, 1987. Originally published in 1926; the second edition first appeared in 1965; the controversial new edition is The New Fowler's Modern English Usage 3rd ed. (Burchfield, R. W., ed. Clarendon Press, 1996). The most classic of the three classic usage guides (along with Bernstein and Follett), this always seemed a bit too old-fashioned (no doubt the new edition addresses that) and very, very British to me.

[Handbook of Good English] [Recommended]
The Handbook of Good English, Revised & Updated
Johnson, Edward D. New York: Washington Square Press, 1991. A remarkably readable guide to grammar, punctuation, and style -- the best I've found. You may be tempted to buy Karen Elizabeth Gordon's books The Transitive Vampire and The Well-Tempered Sentence because they look like they would be more fun. They are more fun. But this is a much better book and a better reference.

The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia, 3rd ed.
Legasse, Paul. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1995. This handy one-volume reference is very useful for minor fact-checking, and the price is great.

The New Roget's Thesaurus of the English Language in Dictionary Form
Lewis, Norman. New York: Putnam, 1981. There are several thesauruses bearing the Roget name, but not all are good. This is my personal favorite. To be useful, a thesaurus must have a big selection of synonyms under each entry; Roget's II, for example, fails miserably in this respect. What does a copy editor need a thesaurus for? To fix word repetitions in copy, and -- most especially -- to find shorter and punchier words to use in headlines.

The Globe and Mail Style Book
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1998. I've read that only three daily newspapers in Canada use Canadian spelling, and The Globe and Mail ("Canada's National Newspaper") is one of them. Canadian punctuation follows American style rather than British, but spelling is on the British model: cheque, colour, grey, licence, theatre, traveller. (See also the Canadian Press Stylebook.)

The New York Public Library Desk Reference, 3rd ed.
IDG Books Worldwide, 1998. A rather amazing book of charts and lists of practically everything: composers, authors, computer terms, Latin prefixes, government agencies, and important dates in history, to name only a few.

Prentice Hall Handbook for Writers, 12th ed.
New York: Prentice Hall, 1994. A typical example of a good English-composition handbook. Useful for looking up parts of speech when you have to explain to a writer in detail why his grammar is not doing the job. I actually use Handbook for Writers, by Celia Millward (1983); all these handbooks (intended for use in college freshman composition courses) are very similar. I can also recommend the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers 5th ed. (1999).

The Elements of Style, 4th ed.
Strunk, William Jr., and E. B. White. Allyn & Bacon, 1999. The classic, lovingly referred to as "Strunk and White." You must read it cover to cover at least once. Not much use as a reference, but every copy editor should reread it every couple of years as a refresher.

Trademark Checklist
Available from the International Trademark Association (INTA), 1133 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10036-6710 USA. Best source for product names that must be capitalized. This is also online at the INTA Web site.

Merriam-Webster's Biographical Dictionary (1995) and Geographical Dictionary (1997)
Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster. These are fantastic desk references for spelling, capitalization, and dates. Very reliable. Use Web. Geo to look up rivers, cities, mountains, and regions. (See also atlases.) Use Web. Bio to look up anyone no longer living, check birth and death dates, place of birth, achievements.

The World Almanac and Book of Facts -- 2000
A new edition is printed each year and comes out in December. Essential for lists such as winners of Pulitzer or Nobel prizes, sports statistics, and quick hits on historical dates.

[Recommended]
Words Into Type, 3rd ed.
Pearson, 1974 (orig. Prentice Hall). If you are already familiar with the Chicago Manual, you probably don't need this. I was trained on Chicago but came to prefer this book early in my career. A new edition was planned for 1999, but there's been no sign of it. Sometimes one can find the 3rd edition of WIT (hardcover only) in a used-book store for a good price.

World Atlases
Expect to pay about $100 for a good atlas. Always check the copyright date; don't buy one from before 1990! Buy an oversize edition so that all the maps are nice and large. I recommend:

Skill Builders

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By "skill builders" I mean that these books are good for boning up on points of grammar, punctuation, etc.; they are not as well suited for frequent reference (except Johnson, which is great for everything). Some of my favorites are out of print, such as R. Thomas Berner's Language Skills for Journalists (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1983).

Bare Bones Reference

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If you are the lone copy editor at a particularly stingy publication (I feel so bad for you; please look for a new job) -- what are the minimum requirements for your reference shelf?

I would add The Associated Press Stylebook and Johnson's Handbook of Good English if possible. At a specialty publication, you would also need specialized references (such as a dictionary of computer terms, if you worked for a computer magazine), and you might be able to forgo the almanac.

 

Reference Books: A Bibliography for Copy Editors, by Mindy McAdams
Copyright © 1992, 1995, 1997, 1998, 2000 by Melinda J. McAdams. All Rights Reserved. If you want to link to this, go ahead. If you want to quote it in printed form, in part, you must cite this Web page properly. The proper citation for this page is:

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You may not reproduce this page in its entirety, either online or in any printed form. To do so would be in violation of the copyright laws of the United States.

I would be very happy to receive any corrections or suggested additions to this list. I first compiled the bibliography in 1991 and 1992; I did a serious revision in 1997, but I'm not as attuned to new books in this field as I was before 1994.

Last updated June 2, 2000

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