342Reviews quarrel 'a square or diamond-shaped pane of glass' and sennight 'a week'. But he does not offer definitions for the other six that are typical of "colonial" usage: bowels, fore-seat, illumination, lixivium and publishment. Their annotation in the textbook reflects its editors' judgment that these words (or their special senses) "are likely to need explanation so that modern readers can better understand and enjoy writing of Colonial times" (Lederer, p. 7). One discerns in this work the result of years of effort by a dedicated amateur scholar. At least two of the persons he thanks for their "generous help" are lexicographers (Frederick G. Cassidy and the late Jess M. Stein), and the publisher of Verbatim Books is another distinguished dictionary-maker, Laurence Urdang. Had Lederer been provided with guidance about scholarly dictionaries early in his project, the resulting work would be a much more valuable contribution that what he eventually produced. Still, as the topical index suggests, Colonial English is designed for the logophile rather than for the reader of early literature and documents. For this purpose, it provides sometimes amusing and often illuminating information. Richard W. Bailey The University of Michigan New Words Dictionary. Harold LeMay, Sid Lerner, and Marian Taylor. New York: Ballantine Books, 1985. vi + 118 pp. $2.50. The cover copy for this brief volume claims that it contains "over 300 everyday words that don't yet appear in regular dictionaries; new words, like toyetic and breakdancing; new usages, like window, cooler, mousse; [and] trendy words and acronyms." Yet a random comparison with Mish's Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1983) reveals a good number that are in that particular "regular dictionary": artificial intelligence (post-1966), chlamydia (post-1931), cooler, electronic mail (post-1979), hat trick (post-1882), pixel Reviews343 (post-1969), and sack [in the sense used in American football]. The three compilers of this work describe themselves respectively as "a lifelong linguist, painter, and sculptor," "a book packager," and "the head of her own editing service." Why Random House, publisher of a respected array of dictionaries, should bring out this slight volume is something of a mystery. The preface by Stuart Flexner is at pains to explain what the volume is not: "The authors of this book do not pretend to be professional lexicographers and do not pretend to be arbiters in the world of today's neologisms. They do not promise that their work is based on the vast citation files, a staff of experienced dictionary editors and consultants, or the years of research, checking, and painstaking editing needed to create major dictionaries. They do, however, promise to be alert, to serve as part of any early-warning system of new terms that may become important in the language, and to attempt informal definitions from the first, imprecise evidence while the terms may still be emerging and not fully formed." Even these modest goals are not fully achieved here. The Helsinki Agreement, we are told, "was signed by the countries of Europe in 1975" though the signatories included Canada and the United States; surrogate mothers are not invariably impregnated by artificial insemination. Dated citations are not included in this work; phonetic respellings are occasionally provided; definitions are generally informal; a topical index (with eight categories) reveals that the largest class of words in the volume concerns "products and services." Readers are invited to nominate additions for the "next edition." The New Words Dictionary is thus not at all competitive with the Merriam-Webster supplementary volumes, the two Barnhart Dictionaries of New English, or the periodical Dictionary Companion. But it is designed for the mass market and for the lexically curious. What it reveals, of course, is the failure of better dictionaries to serve the needs of those interested in lexical innovation. Richard W. Bailey The University of Michigan ...