This book is the result of hunting on the Internet for unrecorded words. In these pages, you’ll find words you’ve never seen before - even though they’ve been around for decades. You’ll find old words with new definitions. You’ll find foreign words tiptoeing into foreign Englishes, sports jargon butting into politics, street slang bouncing out of California, and Spanish moving comfortably into mainstream American English. From dozens of countries, from politics and sports, slang and jargon, humdrum to extraordinary, new and old, what you’ll read is language that deserves a little more attention.

From author: “Over the years I have often found myself both amazed and impressed by the level of wine knowledge and honesty of UK wine drinkers in discussing the taste of wine. Interestingly, the same cannot be said for our friends around the world. In fact, wine-producing countries, in my experience, often have the least well-informed citizens. I have puzzled over why this might be. Perhaps they are too close to the subject and, as they inevitably drink wine regularly, often every lunch and dinner, they don't tend to think much about what's in the glass”

This dictionary defines 10,000 terms and acronyms pertaining to all areas of computing, including hardware, networks, programming, applications, and databases.

Phrasal verbs, also called two-word verbs, are idiomatic expressions wherein the second element of the verb (the adverb or particle) is not necessarily predictable. For instance, why the word up in call up a friend? Why not say call on a friend or call in a friend? Actually, those are three separate, unpredictable combinations, and they each mean something completely different. For example, you can call up a friend on the telephone, call on a friend to visit a friend’s home, and call in a friend to come help you with something.

Architecture is unquestionably one of the arts, and certainly not a lesser one, but dealing with it purely as an art would be very incomplete. For, more than other arts, it depends heavily on technology as concerns materials used, construction techniques, and new technological possibilities in other fields. There is also a commercial aspect, as cost matters in many - if not quite all - cases. Meanwhile, broader trends in society and politics impinge on just what will be built, while aesthetic currents and even fads determine what style will be adopted…

From author: “As an undergraduate student some time last century, I remember grappling with a number of terms linked to the European Union (EU). These included words such as neo-functionalism, integration and supranationalism (to name but three). At that time, there was no resource to give brief explanations of such terms. Surprisingly, little has changed today. When people discuss issues surrounding the EU, they come into contact with terms which are unfamiliar to them. Concepts such as ‘subsidiarity’ or the ‘emergency brake’ may trip off the tongues of experts, but to the student or lay person they may as well be a foreign language”

From author: “This Dictionary is the outcome of an idea I had several years ago when, in my profession, I aclually lived the difficulty of finding definitions of acronyms, initialisms and abbreviations and possibly additional information. In my daily professional life, same as it may have happened to you, I was also confronted with many acronyms and initialisms that had identical sets of letters but different definitions”

The merit of Captain Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue has been long and universally acknowledged. But its circulation was confined almost exclusively to the lower orders of society: he was not aware, at the time of its compilation, that our young men of fashion would at no very distant period be as distinguished for the vulgarity of their jargon as the inhabitants of Newgate; and he therefore conceived it superfluous to incorporate with his work the few examples of fashionable slang that might occur to his observation.

For more than three decades, this internationally-known reference has been the easiest, fastest, and most reliable way for anyone to gain fluency in the language of science and technology. Containing more than 110,000 entries that span 100 fields ranging from acoustics to zoology, the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms features definitions written in language understandable to students and the general public, yet advanced enough for professionals.

With more than 3000 terms, the fields covered in the Dictionary of Pure and Applied Physics (DPAP) are acoustics, biophysics and medical physics, communication, electricity, electronics, geometrical optics, low temperature physics, magnetism, and physical optics. Like most other branches of science, physics has grown rapidly over the last decade. As such, many of the terms used in older books have become obsolete and new terms have appeared in scientific and technical literature. Care has been taken to ensure that old terms are not included in the DPAP and new terminologies are not missed. Some of the terms are related to other fields, e.g., engineering fields (mostly electrical and mechanical), mathematics, chemistry, biology.