American Heritage Dictionary

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The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD) is a dictionary of American English published by Boston publisher Houghton-Mifflin.

The AHD dictionary broke ground among dictionaries by using corpus linguistics in compiling word-frequency and other information. The AHD made the innovative step of combining prescriptive elements (how language should be used) and descriptive information (how it actually is used); the latter was derived from text corpora. Citations were based on a million word, three-line citation database prepared by Brown University linguist Henry Kucera.

The third edition was also a new departure for the publisher because it was developed in a database, which facilitated the use of the linguistic data for other applications, such as electronic dictionaries.

The AHD is larger than the desk dictionaries of the time but smaller than Webster's Third or The Random-House Dictionary of the English Language.

There is a lower-priced college edition with monocolor printing.

Editions

• The first edition appeared in 1969, and was also highly praised for its Indo-European etymologies. In addition to the normally expected etymologies, which for instance trace the word "ambiguous" to a Proto-Indo-European root "ag-", meaning "to drive", the appendices include
  • a seven-page article by Prof. Calvert Watkins entitled "Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans", and
  • "Indo-European Roots", 46 pages of entries that are each organized around one of some thousand inferred Proto-Indo-European roots and the English words of the AHD that are understood to have evolved from them. These entries might be called "reverse etymologies": the "ag-" entry there, for instance lists 49 words derived from it, as diverse as "agent", "essay", "purge", "stratagem", "ambassador", "axiom" and "pellagra", along with information about varying routes through intermediate transformations on the way to the contemporary words.
• The second edition (1980) omitted the Indo-European etymologies.
• The third edition (1992) reintroduced the Indo-European materials.
• The fourth edition (2000) added Semitic language materials, including an analogous appendix of roots. As of 2004, it remains the current edition.