Webster’s New International
The unabridged Webster’s of the Book’s own day: the dictionary behind Look up on every page of the Book, and here the whole entry, as transcribed and as printed.
Why this dictionary
The Book went to press in 1939. The unabridged Webster’s of that year was the New International Dictionary, Second Edition of 1934, and it is still in copyright, as is the Collegiate abridged from it; neither can be put on a site. The edition before it, the first New International of 1909, is in the public domain, and this is a printing of it from 1923, with the Addenda of new words the later printings carry.
It is also, as likely as not, the Webster’s the Book’s first readers had. A dictionary is bought once and kept for decades; this edition was the unabridged Webster’s for twenty-five years, until the Second came out, so the big dictionary on a shelf in 1939 was likelier this one than the new one. Where a word’s sense has moved since, the one its first readers brought to the page is here.
The pages are the Internet Archive’s scan of a Library of Congress copy, which the Library says it knows no copyright restriction on. The entry shown as printed is cut from that scan, and the page on archive.org is a click away under every one.
How it is read
The text of an entry is a machine reading of the scan: the Internet Archive’s own OCR and, page by page as the work goes, a re-reading of each column by Claude (Haiku 5.5), which reads the respellings and their marks the OCR could not. Both are transcriptions, so the entry image sits under every entry: read the definition there before you quote it.
An entry marked uncertain is one the model could not read surely. A headword the OCR got a letter wrong is still found when its neighbours on the page are, and a word the dictionary lacks shows its nearest headwords.
Nothing is fetched until you look a word up; then the page takes one small index file and one column image from the site’s own store, and nothing from anywhere else. No tracking. No accounts. No comments.
The Big Book’s contents · the glossary, the words the Book uses in a sense of its own day, each read in its passage.