The Oxford companion to the English language

The Oxford companion to the English language / editor, Tom McArthur ; managing editor, Feri McArthur by McArthur, Ferri. McArthur, Thomas Burns [editor] Oxford University Press, NY, 1986. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. Language is the lifeblood of a culture, and to be interested in culture is in some sense to be interested in language, in the shapes and sounds of words, in the history of reading, writing, and speech, in the endless variety of dialects and slangs, in the incessant creativity of the human mind as it reaches out to others. [This book] is a thousand-page cornucopia covering virtually every aspect of the English language a well as language in general. [The] ‘Companion’ provides bibliogaphies for the larger entries, generous cross-referencing, etymologies for headwords, a chronology of English times to 1990, and an index of people who appear in entries or bibliographies.