About
the resource centre for
The Oxford Dictionary for Writers & Editors
and
The Oxford Guide to Style
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WELCOME to the website dedicated to The Oxford Dictionary for Writers & Editors and The Oxford Guide to Style. I hope it will have something to appeal to authors, editors, publishers, and printers—in fact anyone interested in the written word.
The
Oxford Dictionary for Writers & Editors
(ODWE)
This major new edition—completely updated and enlarged—was
published in 2000 by Oxford University Press. The essential guide for
anyone who works with words, it offers clear and succinct advice on common
conundrums: spelling difficulties, hyphenation and punctuation, abbreviations,
foreign words and phrases, confusables, people and places, unusual terms,
and spelling and style differences between British and US English. Originally
created by F. Howard Collins and published in 1905 as the Author and
Printer (later Authors’ and Printers’ Dictionary),
it ran to twelve editions before being renamed The Oxford Dictionary
for Writers & Editors in 1983. 
The
Oxford Guide to Style (OGS)
Horace Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers at the
University Press, Oxford was first printed in 1893; over the course
of thirty-nine editions Hart’s Rules grew to be the much-loved
standard work on editing and typesetting, explaining subject-by-subject
each major aspect of editing and typesetting. A new edition, called The
Oxford Guide to Style (OGS), was published in February 2002. It completely
revises and expands Hart’s Rules, building upon the original's
expertise and bringing its carefully accumulated wisdom into yet another
century.
Both Collins’s Author and Printer and Hart’s Rules are considered classic editorial works: Sue Walker, for example, in Typography and Language in Everyday Life, describes them as ‘the two most influential house style manuals in the UK’, and Peter Sutcliffe, in his Oxford University Press: An Informal History, calls them simply ‘two of the most influential books ever published by the Press’. The books’ unique fame and longevity generate an interest in them quite apart from their underlying utility as reference texts. As such part of this site is devoted to their history; it is aimed at anyone with an interest in the history of printing and editing. As the person responsible for both of these new editions, I hope this site will enable you to learn more about them.
This website has four main goals: to supply you with
information on previous editions of these books
There is an additional section with some background about me, to assuage any mild curiosity you might have regarding the person behind these new editions, and this site.
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