Along with the German-language Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, it is one of the largest reference works on the history and theory of music.

An American Supplement edited by Waldo Selden Pratt and Charles N. Boyd was published in 1920 in Philadelphia by Theodore Presser.

[1] The next edition was published in 1980 under the name The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and was greatly expanded to 20 volumes with 22,500 articles and 16,500 biographies.

These typically were enhanced with expanded and updated material and included individual and grouped composer biographies,[6] a four-volume dictionary of American music (1984; revised 2013, 8 vols.

As Sadie writes in the preface, "The biggest single expansion in the present edition has been in the coverage of 20th-century composers".

This edition was subjected to some criticism owing to the significant number of typographical and factual errors that it contained,[12] but also received positive reviews.

[13] Two volumes were re-issued in corrected versions after production errors originally caused the omission of sections of Igor Stravinsky's worklist and Richard Wagner's bibliography.

[14] Grove Music Online includes a large number of revisions and additions of new articles.

[1] The 2001 edition contains: Two non-existent composers have appeared in the work: Dag Henrik Esrum-Hellerup was the subject of a hoax entry in the 1980 New Grove.

Though successfully introduced into the encyclopaedia, Esrum-Hellerup appeared in the first printing only: soon exposed as a hoax, the entry was removed and the space filled with an illustration.

Unlike Esrum-Hellerup, Baldini was not a modern creation: his name and biography were in fact created almost a century earlier by the German musicologist Hugo Riemann.

The New Grove entry on Baldini was supported by a fictional reference in the form of an article supposedly in the Archiv für Freiburger Diözesan Geschichte.

Though successfully introduced into the encyclopaedia, Baldini appeared in the first printing only: soon exposed as a hoax, the entry was removed.