Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary

[1] The Random House publishing company entered the reference book market after World War II.

[2][3] In the late 1950s, it was decided to publish an expansion of the American College Dictionary, which had been modestly updated with each reprinting since its publication.

Under editors Jess Stein and Laurence Urdang, they augmented the American College Dictionary with large numbers of entries in all fields, primarily proper names, and published it in 1966 as The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: The Unabridged Edition.

In his preface to the 1966 edition, Stein wrote (p. vi) that the Random House Dictionary steers "a linguistically sound middle course" between the "lexicographer's Scylla and Charybdis: should the dictionary be an authoritarian guide to 'correct' English or should it be so antiseptically free of comment that it may defeat the user by providing him with no guidance at all?

This edition adopted the Merriam-Webster Collegiate practice of adding dates for the entry of words into the language.