Clarence Barnhart

Who was Clarence Barnhart?

Clarence Lewis Barnhart was an American lexicographer best known for editing the Thorndike Century series of graded dictionaries, which were based on word lists and concepts of definition developed by psychological theorist Edward Thorndike. Barnhart subsequently revised and expanded the series and maintained them through the 1980's.

During World War II he undertook the editing of the Dictionary of U.S. Army Terms for the War Department. He created the American College Dictionary, published by Random House in 1947, which was later used as the basis of the Random House Dictionary. His three-volume New Century Cyclopedia of Names, published in 1954, was an expansion of the original 1894 volume of the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia. From the NCCN, he produced the New Century Handbook of English Literature. In the 1950s and 1960s he developed the linguistic approach to reading instruction begun by Leonard Bloomfield entitled Let's Read.

His largest general dictionary was the World Book Dictionary, a two-volume work created as a supplement to the World Book Encyclopedia. It was first published in 1963 and thoroughly revised in 1976, totaling approximately 225,000 individual entries. Consistent with the encyclopedia's use by young people, he wrote definitions which were both simple and accurate, and most entries include sample sentences or phrases. Like Webster's Third New International, it included few proper names, leaving them to be covered by the companion volumes of the encyclopedia.