A Dictionary of Modern English Usage

A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), by Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933), is a style guide to British English usage, pronunciation, and writing. Covering topics including plurals and literary technique, distinctions among like words (such as homonyms and synonyms), and the use of foreign terms, it became the standard for most style guides that followed. Thus, the 1926 first edition remains in print, despite the existence of the 1965 second edition (edited by Ernest Gowers, and reprinted in 1983 and 1987), and later versions. The 1996 third edition, as The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (with a revised third in 2004) was mostly rewritten by Robert W. Burchfield, as a usage dictionary incorporating corpus linguistics data; the 2015 fourth edition (Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, edited by Jeremy Butterfield) follows similar principles to the third. In whatever edition, the work is informally known as Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Fowler, and Fowler’s.