The Dickson Baseball Dictionary; The Revised, Expanded, and Now-Definitive Work on the Language of Baseball

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. Third Edition [stated]. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xxiv, 974, [8] pages. Preface to the Third Edition. 263 Illustrations. Introduction. Afterword. Annotated Bibliography. Format is approximately 7.25 inches by 10.5 inches and is about 2.5 inches wide! For his published work on baseball, The Washington Post has described Dickson as "baseball's answer to Noah Webster or, at the very least, William Safire. Because of its deep and broad coverage, its authoritativeness and its rich and colorful descriptions, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary will prove indispensable to baseball fans and word lovers alike. That rarest of sports books, a valuable reference work that provides absorbing and enlightening reading. (Sports Illustrated) Hailed as a staggering piece of scholarship (Wall Street Journal) The Dickson Baseball Dictionary is the most complete resource on the lexicon of baseball in the English language. More than 200 photos throughout the book, many rare and previously unpublished, lluminate various historical and contemporary terms. More than twenty-five years in the making, with the help of more than 400 baseball and lexical experts, this masterful third edition, expanded by more than 30 percent, with over 10,000 terms and 18,000 definitions, provides the comprehensive history and meanings of words and phrases from around the world of baseball. Drawing on dozens of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periodicals, as well as contemporary sources, Paul Dickson's brilliant, illuminating definitions trace the earliest appearances of our most treasured baseball expressions (tearin' up the pea patch, can of corn, catbird seat, etc.). Termed baseballs Webster, Dickson has spent nearly a decade painstakingly revising and writing new definitions, for words both well-known and obscure, including those introduced by Latin-American ballplayers, and statistical expressions relating to fantasy baseball and the SABR/Moneyball era.