Encyclop�dia Britannica

The Encyclopædia Britannica is the oldest and most prestigious English-language general encyclopedia. Its articles are commonly considered accurate, reliable and well-written.

A product of the Scottish enlightenment, it was originally published in Edinburgh by Adam and Charles Black beginning in the 18th century. Unlike the French Encyclopédie, Britannica was an extremely conservative publication. Later editions were usually dedicated to the reigning monarch. The publication moved from Scotland to London and became associated with The Times newspaper in the 1870s for its ninth and tenth editions. For the eleventh edition the publication became associated with the University of Cambridge. The trademark and publication rights were sold after the 11th edition to Sears Roebuck and it moved to Chicago where it has remained. The current publisher is Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. (properly spelt with æ, the ae-ligature), which now owns a trademark on the word "Britannica".

As of 2004, the most complete version of Encyclopædia Britannica contains about 120,000 articles with 44 million words. It is published in paper form (32 volumes, list price US$1400, 65,000 articles), online (120,000 articles, brief summaries of articles can be viewed for free, and the full text is available for US$10 per month or US$60 per year for individual subscribers), on CD-ROM (>100,000 articles, US$50), and on DVD-ROM (>100,000 articles, US$50).

The current version of Britannica was written by over 4,000 contributors, including noted scholars such as Milton Friedman, Carl Sagan and Michael DeBakey. 35% of the content of the encyclopedia has been re-written within the last two years.

Edition history

Edition	Published	Size
1st	1768–1771	3 vol.
2nd	1777–1784	10 vol.
3rd	1788–1797, 1801 sup.	18 vol. + 2 sup.
4th	1801–1809	20 vol.
5th	1815	20 vol.
6th	1820–1823, 1815–1824 sup.	20 vol. + 2 sup.
7th	1830–1842	21 vol.
8th	1852–1860	21 vol. + index
9th	1870–1890	24 vol. + index.¹
10th	1902–1903	9th ed. + 9 sup.²
11th	1910–1911	29 vol.³
12th	1921–1922	11th ed. + 3 sup.
13th	1926	11th ed.+ 6 sup.
14th	1929–1973	24 vol.
15th	1974–1984	28 vol.
16th	1985–	32 vol.

vol. = volume, sup. = supplement

(1)  9th ed. featured articles by notables of the day, such as James Maxwell on Electricity and Magnetism, and William Thomson (who became Lord Kelvin) on Heat.
(2) 10th ed. added a maps volume and an index volume
(3) 11th ed. Considered to be the classic edition of Encyclopædia Britannica and available in the public domain (see 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica).

The first CD-ROM edition was issued in 1994.