In essentials Fowler’s Modern English Usage can never be out of date; for his primary concern was to teach clear thinking and the orderly use of precise words, and to castigate whatever is slovenly, pretentious or pedantic. But the conventions of grammar and vocabulary that he called usage never stand still, and it is now thirty-five years since he wrote. Constructions condemned as solecistic, for example, have forced their way into idiom; slipshod extensions have won a respected place in our vocabulary, vogue words have fallen out of fashion and others have taken their places; popularized technicalities have proliferated. The alterations and additions made in this revision represent an attempt to do what we may suppose Fowler himself would have wished to do, if he had been alive today, to keep his book abreast of present-day usage. The publication in the meantime of other Oxford works of reference has made it possible to find room for new material by omitting a number of articles that Fowler put in merely for definition.