Language Expert Who Edited Dictionaries

Came across this name in the Q&A with Bruce Weber.

As the managing editor of the first edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language — a 9 1/4-pound, 2,091-page volume defining more than 260,0000 terms, which appeared in 1966 and was the first dictionary to be organized with the aid of a computer — Mr. Urdang presided over a seven-year research and compilation project that, at a cost of $3 million, was, at the time, the largest undertaking in the history of Random House, a company founded in 1925. But it was merely a foundation for a career that, in so many words, encompassed so many words.

Mr. Urdang’s view of language was that of an enjoyer, someone who delighted in its flexibility and invention, rather than that of a guardian always on alert against violations of precedent. In 1974 he was the founding editor of Verbatim, a respected quarterly newsletter on language that melded academic treatments of linguistic topics (“Southern Amerind Lexical Contributions”) and more amused and amusing stories with titles like “Ooglification in American English Slang” and “Prep School Slanguage.”

That quarterly now has an eponymous blog.

In 1969 he started Laurence Urdang Inc., a company with offices in Connecticut and Aylesbury, England. It published not only Verbatim but also some 150 books, his own and others’, on words and language. In 1972 he compiled The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words. It was a book that was not supposed to be a comprehensive work, just an enjoyable one for word enthusiasts. Or as Mr. Urdang put it himself in the introduction:
“This is not a succedaneum for satisfying the nympholepsy of nullifidians. Rather it is hoped that the haecceity of this enchiridion of arcane and recondite sesquipedalian items will appeal to the oniomania of an eximious Gemeinschaft whose legerity and sophrosyne, whose Sprachgefühl and orexis will find more than fugacious fulfillment among its felicific pages.”