Easy Does It

Clarence Barnhart was so fed up with dictionaries that he decided to put together a new one of his own. He was quite clear about what he wanted to avoid: out-of-date talk and learned impenetrability in general. It infuriates him, for instance, to see agate defined as "a variegated chalcedony, having its colors arranged in stripes." That sort of definition, says he, is like "thrusting calculus at a fellow who has only a learning of algebra."

This week, after three years' work with a staff of 28, Barnhart published a dictionary with no calculus at all. The new Thorndike-Barnhart Comprehensive Desk Dictionary (Doubleday; $2.75) has 80,000 words, looks and weighs about the same as other volumes of its kind. But the way the 80,000 words were chosen and defined is something new in lexicography.

Barnhart based his choices on the research of the late E. L. Thorndike of Columbia University, who counted millions of words in books, magazines and newspapers, then rated each one according to how often it was used. Later, Thorndike's students counted the meanings of each word, alone or in simple combinations (e.g., set has 544), and ranked those according to frequency. Despite all the counting, standard dictionary-makers kept right on printing the oldest definition of any word first, whether it is archaic or not.

To Barnhart, this "historical" method in an ordinary desk dictionary seems absurd. A bank, says he, is not first of all "the table or counter of a moneychanger" as Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary lists it. In Barnhart's book, it is "an institution for keeping, lending, exchanging, and issuing money."

By the same token, Barnhart never defines a word with others more complicated or rare. Adjoin is not "to lie contiguous to," but "be next to"; adventurous is not "prone to embark on hazardous enterprises," but "ready to take risks"; shake is not "to be agitated with irregular vibratory motion," but to "move quickly backwards and forwards, up and down, or from side to side"; remainder is not "residue; residuum; remnant," but "the part left over."

Readers of Barnhart's dictionary will not get a definition of the adjective evil that begins: "Injurious, mischievous." He speaks right up: "Bad; wrong; sinful; wicked." As for agate, he suppresses "a variegated chalcedony" and makes it "a variety of quartz . . ."

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