A Dictionary of Modern English Usage

This article relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources. Find sources: "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (December 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

A Dictionary of Modern English Usage

The title page of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926)
Author	H. W. Fowler
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Published	1926
Publisher	Oxford University Press
OCLC	815620926

A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), by Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933), is a style guide to British English usage, pronunciation, and writing. Covering topics such as plurals and literary technique, distinctions among like words (homonyms and synonyms), and the use of foreign terms, the dictionary became the standard for other style guides to writing in English. Hence, the 1926 first edition remains in print, along with the 1965 second edition, edited by Ernest Gowers, which was reprinted in 1983 and 1987. The 1996 third edition was re-titled as The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, and revised in 2004, was mostly rewritten by Robert W. Burchfield, as a usage dictionary that incorporated corpus linguistics data;^[1] and the 2015 fourth edition, revised and re-titled Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, was edited by Jeremy Butterfield, as a usage dictionary. Informally, readers refer to the style guide and dictionary as Fowler's Modern English Usage, Fowler, and Fowler's.