By Dr. Robert Sungenis
A dictionary built by subtraction. About 6,000 words in fewer than 300 pages, kept because they are worth adding to your own speech and writing: solipsism, invidious, laconic, epagoge, exoteric, farraginous, jejune, redintegrate. Words like stop and go are left out. So are most technical, scientific and legal terms, and anything built from a common prefix (re-, trans-, un-, tri-, super-, non-) whose sense is plain once you know the root.
The case for the size is made by comparison: the Oxford English Dictionary at 19 volumes and over 3 million words at one end, Webster's New Pocket Dictionary at just under 400 pages and about 35,000 words at the other, and the entry for run in Webster's Third filling nearly three pages of 5-point type. Each word here appears in its single most practical part of speech, usually with its Latin, Greek, French or German root, and the accented syllable is underlined instead of being marked with pronunciation symbols. A few exceptions are let in: short incisive words, some slang (chutzpah, Bob's your uncle), and foreign phrases that earn their keep, such as ex post facto, fait accompli, ipse dixit and habeas corpus.