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PRIMARY SCHOOL DICTIONARY

OF THE

ENGLISH LANGUAGE,

EXPLANATORY, PRONOUNCING, AND SYNONYMOUS.

WITH AN APPENDIX CONTAINING VARIOUS USEFUL TABLES. MAINLY ABRIDGED FROM THE LATEST EDITION OF THE AMERICAN DICTIONARY OF

NOAH WEBSTER, LL.D.,

BY

WILLIAM G. WEBSTER

AND

WILLIAM A. WHEELER.

Illustrated with more than Two Hundred Engravings on Wood.

[graphic]

IVISON, BLAKEMAN, TAYLOR & CO.
NEW YORK AND CHICAGO.

PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. CINCINNATI: WILSON, HINKLE & CO. SPRINGFIELD, MASS.: G. & C. MERRIAM.

Educ T 758,74.885

HARVARD COLLEGE
Sep 7,1929

LIBRARY

Mrs. Luther S. Luringston
Cambridge

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by
G. & C. MERRIAM,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

PREFACE.

THIS little volume has been prepared with the design of furnishing the younger pupils in our schools with a Dictionary sufficiently full and complete to meet all their ordinary wants, yet small in size and of very moderate cost. Miscellaneous readers, however, will find it a convenient and serviceable manual for consultation, especially with respect to the pronunciation and spelling of the common words of our language. The general plan is the same as that of the "Common-School Dictionary," and though less comprehensive in its vocabulary, somewhat less copious in its explanations, and having fewer wood-cuts, it retains the most important and valuable features of that work. It has been brought within the limits it occupies by the omission of many derivatives in er, ish, less, ly, ness, ship, in, out, over, un, under, and the like, inasmuch as most words of this sort present no difficulty of orthography, pronunciation, or interpretation; by occasional retrenchment of definitions and synonyms; by leaving out or slightly abridging several of the Tables or Vocabularies of the Appendix; and by various typographical and other expedients for saving space.

The attention of instructors is called to the fact that this work may be advantageously used as a text-book for teaching spelling, the "Rules for Spelling" given in the introduction being unusually complete, and the words in the Vocabulary often having figures affixed to them referring to these rules. It will be seen, without

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