Los Angeles -- When actor Tony Randall first heard the word "campestral," he lunged for his favorite dictionary.
The Felix Unger of words -- def. finnicky, persnickety, discriminating -- Mr. Randall loves expanding his vocabulary. So much so that publisher Houghton Mifflin selected Mr. Randall to sit on the usage panel of its American Heritage Dictionary. The third edition was just published.
"I'm a dictionary reader," Mr. Randall, a New York resident, said during a recent phone interview. "I always have been."
Campestral, by the way, means relating to open fields.
And lexicography -- the act, process, art or work of writing or compiling a dictionary or dictionaries -- is big business for the four major publishing houses.
Their target audience is students, particularly college students, who are presently packing their bags and books and heading back to school.
With an explosion of dictionaries on the market, selecting the one that best suits a student's needs can be difficult, experts say.
Steven Parker, a political science major at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), keeps two dictionaries -- a Webster's and an American Heritage -- at home to help him hunt for unfamiliar terms bandied about by professors. "I like expanding my vocabulary," the 22-year-old Van Nuys resident said. "If something catches my eye, I'll take a minute to look at it or words surrounding it."
Many people become attached to a dictionary and will keep it for years, even after newer ones are published.
"There is a rule in lexicography, the moment a dictionary is published it is obsolete because the language has continued to change," said Louis Milic, a Cleveland State University professor and secretary-treasurer of the Dictionary Society of North America. "The soundest principle for a word person is, the latest dictionary is the best," he said.
But the choice can be confusing for the person looking to buy a general-purpose dictionary. It's not a simple matter of just getting "the Webster."
You've got your Random House Webster's College Dictionary. Then there's Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. And the Webster's New World Dictionary.
And there are a host of dictionaries that use the name Webster, which is in the public domain, that are unrelated.
So forget the name and look to reputable publishers, said Kenneth Kister, author of Kister's Best Dictionaries for Adults & Young People (Oryx; $39.50).
