Opis
Revised by A. C. Gimson
Fourteenth Edititon
The English Pronouncing Dictionary (EPD) was created by the British phonetician Daniel Jones and was first published in 1917. It originally comprised over 50,000 headwords listed in their spelling form, each of which was given one or more pronunciations transcribed using a set of phonemic symbols based on a standard accent. The dictionary is now in its 18th edition. John C. Wells has written of it “EPD has set the standard against which other dictionaries must inevitably be judged”.
Edition 14: Jones died in 1967, and the work of editing the EPD was taken up by his pupil Alfred C. Gimson. Since the dictionary was produced by traditional typesetting until the 15th edition, any substantial revision involved considerable work and expense, but Gimson introduced a new style of phonemic transcription for the 14th edition, published in 1977. When the cost of producing a completely new edition was judged prohibitive, a revised version of the 14th with a supplementary annexe adding about 1000 words was published in 1988; Gimson’s colleague Susan Ramsaran was his assistant editor for this work and completed it after Gimson’s death in 1985. Subsequently, the rights to the EPD were acquired by Cambridge University Press. According to his autobiography, John C. Wells was approached by Dent to succeed Gimson as the editor, only to decline the offer because Dent was “not prepared to make the major changes that [Wells] considered necessary” and compile an entirely new pronunciation dictionary to be published by Longman.
