The New Samsad English Bengali Dictionary of Contemporary English

This book is a supplementary volume to English-Bengali Dictionary fifth edition available on India club web site as BC 3181. It records and explains the new words and new uses of old words that have come into the language in the last half century. This New Samsad English-Bengali Dictionary of Contemporary English was originally conceived as a long appendix to the fifth edition of the Samsad English-Bengali Dictionary, recording and explaining the new words and new uses of old words that have come into the language in the last half century. But after the first few months of the project, it was quite clear that the enormous changes that have taken place in this period in every single filed of human experience and thought and practice, and the new concepts and words that they have brought in their train call for an independent dictionary. A little over fifty percent of the entries come from the period 1945-2000, but the rest, already in use earlier, have come to be more frequently used only in the given period. For all practical purposes, this is a supplementary volume to the Samsad English Dictionary, and a major part of the entries will be eventually included in the sixth edition of Samsad English-Bengali Dictionary. Till then Bengali-speaking readers and users of English will have to use both the dictionaries together. The way the English language has been changing and developing in the recent past it is only too likely that the time sixth edition is ready, several of the words included in this dictionary of contemporary English will have gone out of use, and there will be a whole lot of new words to include. To accommodate these new words in a dictionary that should remain user-friendly, it will become necessary to drop a large number of entries available in the fifth edition. Thus the Samsad English-Bengali Dictionary will still remain invaluable records of the state of the language, particularly in its use in India, in the first and second halves of the twentieth century respectively. The New Samsad English Bengali Dictionary of Contemporary English records and explains in reader-friendly English and Bengali the new stock of English words, phrases, expressions and usage that have changed the state of the language in the last half century. It enables the Indian reader and user to come to terms with the new English evident today in all the fields and disciplines of human thought and experience. The two major categories of new entrants in the dictionary are those of scientific and technical words, formed or redefined under the impact of the technological and electronic information revolution; and slang. A lot of words in the second category would have been left out of dictionaries a quarter of a century ago. Their inclusion in a dictionary of contemporary English is an indication of the openness and frankness in everyday communication.