The New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) is a single-volume dictionary of North American English compiled by American editors at the Oxford University Press. The current (second) edition contains more than 250,000 definitions. Erin McKean was its Principal Editor.

NOAD is based upon the New Oxford Dictionary of English (NODE), published in the United Kingdom in 1998, although with substantial editing, additional entries, and the inclusion of illustrations. It is based on a corpus linguistics analysis of Oxford's 200 million word database of contemporary North American English. A notable difference is that the American counterpart includes a diacritical respelling scheme to convey pronunciations, in addition to the Gimson phonemic IPA system used by NODE.

In May 2005, a second edition (NOAD2) was published; it included a CD-ROM with the full text of the dictionary for Palm OS devices.

Since 2005 Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X operating system has come bundled with a dictionary application and widget which credits as its source "Oxford American Dictionaries", and contains the full text of NOAD2. The Amazon Kindle reading device also uses NOAD as its built-in dictionary.

Oxford University Press published NOAD2 in electronic form in 2006 at http://www.oxfordamericandictionary.com/.

[edit] See also

• Oxford University Press
• Oxford English Dictionary
• Canadian Oxford Dictionary

[edit] References

• The New Oxford American Dictionary, First Edition, Elizabeth J. Jewell and Frank R. Abate (editors), 2192 pages, September 2001, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-511227-X.
• The New Oxford American Dictionary, Second Edition, Erin McKean (editor), 2051 pages, May 2005, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-517077-6.

[edit] External links

• The New Oxford American Dictionary, Second Edition website