Everything about Clarence Barnhart totally explained
Clarence Lewis Barnhart (
1900–
1993) was an American lexicographer best known for writing the
Thorndike-Barnhart series of
graded dictionaries, which were based on word lists developed by
psychological theorist
Edward Thorndike.
During World War II he undertook the editing of the
Dictionary of U.S. Army Terms (TM-20-205) for the War Department. He created the
American College Dictionary, published by
Random House in
1947, which was later used as the basis of the
Random House Dictionary. His three-volume
New Century Cyclopedia of Names, published in
1954, was an expansion of the original
1894 volume of the
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia. From this latter work, he produced the
New Century Handbook of English Literature. In the 1950s and 1960s he developed the linguistic approach to reading instruction begun by Leonard Bloomfield.
His largest general dictionary was the
World Book Dictionary, a two-volume work created as a supplement to the
World Book Encyclopedia. It was first published in
1963 and revised in
1976, totaling over 225,00 entries. Consistent with the encyclopedia's use by young people, he wrote definitions which were both simple and accurate, and most entries include sample sentences or phrases. Like
Webster's Third New International, it included few proper names, leaving them to be covered by the companion volumes in the encyclopedia.
He also co-edited the three editions of the
Dictionary of New English, covering new words from the 1960s through the 1980s. In 1982 he began editing a quarterly publication devoted to thorough dictionary treatment of new words, new meanings and changes in usage entitled
The Barnhart Dictionary Companion.
Nearly all of his dictionaries were based heavily upon the collection of evidence the value of which he learned from work he did for Sir William Craigie on the
Dictionary of American English at the University of Chicago. Over his career of 64 years he and his staffs accumulated a file of over 7 million quotations exhibiting contemporary usage of English words. He was active in
interlinguistics, serving as a consultant to the
research body that presented
Interlingua in 1951. In the late 20th century he helped, with his son David, to pioneer the use of electronically retrievable evidence from computerized files of news publications.
His sons,
David Barnhart and
Robert Barnhart, are also lexicographers of note.
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