second edition Plain English Lexicon A guide to whether your words will be understood Martin Cutts Foreword by Christine Mowat, past Chair of Plain Language Association InterNational ( plain ) June 2011 Plain English Lexicon Martin Cutts Plain Language Commission, www.clearest.co.uk Acknowledgements Copyright and permissions Your comments are welcome I’m grateful to World Book, Inc for permission to use content Copyright: Martin Cutts, 2011. If you have comments on the lexicon, including suggestions from the ‘Living Word Vocabulary’*; the British National *Content from the living word vocabulary by permission for words to include, please send them to the author at Corpus Consortium**; my lexicographer colleague Christina of World Book, Inc. www.worldbook.online.com . All rights Plain Language Commission, The Castle, 29 Stoneheads, Gleeson for spending so many hours interrogating the British reserved. This publication may not be reproduced in whole or Whaley Bridge, High Peak SK23 7BB, UK. e w National Corpus and commenting on the draft of the lexicon; in part without permission from the publisher.
[email protected] www.clearest.co.uk Sarah Carr, Marianne Holmes and Judy Brown for their many Key to abbreviations wise suggestions; and Bill DuBay for drawing attention to the **‘The British National Corpus’, version 3 (BNC XML Edition). ‘Living Word Vocabulary’ in his book ‘Smart Language’ and 2007. Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on adj = adjective; Brit E = British English; n = noun; predet = his posts to the Plain Language Association InterNational behalf of the BNC Consortium. http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ predeterminer (a word or phrase that quantifies a noun (plain ) forum, http://www.plainlanguagenetwork.org .