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American
Reference Books Annual 2004
Choice
Reference Books Bulletin/Booklist, December 15, 2003
Reference
Reviews, November 2003
The Phi Beta Kappa Key Reporter, Winter 2004
Reference Reviews (UK) Vol. 18 (2),
March 2004
Review
from: American
Reference Books Annual 2004
The first edition of this dictionary was
published in 1986 (see ARBA 87, entry 657). Its original compiler, Colonel
Trevor N. Dupuy, was a distinguished and prolific scholar of military
history who taught at Harvard, Ohio State, and Rangoon Universities. His
associates on the original volume, Curt Johnson and Grace P. Hayes, worked
for Dupuy's Historical Evaluation and Research Organization and were
notable authors on military subjects in their own right. Dupuy died in
1995, but his name and that of the two original associates remain as
compilers along with the two individuals who actually did the 2d edition,
John M. Taylor (another prolific military history scholar) and Priscilla
S. Taylor (a professional editor). The new edition deleted some entries,
revised others, and added about one-third more new terms, primarily on
developments since the mid-1980s, including the war on terrorism and new
terms related to air force, surface navy, submarines, and intelligence.
The new edition contains 3,500 entries of terms encountered in military
literature, treating antiquity to the present….Just as with the earlier
volume, this edition is useful.
Review from: Choice,
January 2004
Depuy’s concise dictionary
provides ready access to about 3,500 terms common to the U.S. military
vocabulary. It revises an aging edition (CH, Nov’86), expanding it by
roughly a third. It is not to be confused with Richard Bowyer’s Dictionary
of Military Terms (CH, Oct’00) or DOD Dictionary of
Military Terms….It provides better coverage than Bowyer on matters
of military technology and operations and includes many more terms drawn
from general military affairs and military history than DOD Dictionary.
Still, the selection of terms is at times uneven, and entries for similar
terms (aircraft types, for example) do not always deliver the same
information. Some readers may also regret that entries for historical and
foreign terms ("ballista," "gendarme") do not provide
etymological details. Despite these modest shortcomings, this dictionary
will provide most readers with an excellent compromise of coverage,
accuracy, and accessibility. Summing Up: Recommended. General,
undergraduate, and research libraries.
Reviewed by H. Lowood,
Stanford University
Review from: The Phi Beta Kappa Key
Reporter, Winter 2004
This update of the 1986
edition is amazing! Coverage is wide-ranging and thorough, with excellent
coverage of both ancient and modern warfare including recent events and
new technologies, even providing information on terrorist organizations
such as al Qaeda and their 9/11 attacks. Entries are concise, very
readable, and reasonably well cross-referenced. This dictionary should
prove extremely useful to military historians, novelists, students, and
citizens who wish to understand some of the terms they hear on the evening
news.
Reviewed by: Larry J.
Zimmerman, Archaeology Department, Minnesota Historical Society, Fort
Snelling History Center
Review from:
Reference Books Bulletin/Booklist, December 15, 2003
When it was published in 1986, the first
edition of Dictionary of Military Terms was greeted
enthusiastically by reviewers as there had been no standard reference work
on this subject that was satisfactory to both the military profession and
to laypersons. One of the compilers, Colonel Trevor N. Dupuy, was a noted
military theorist, historian, teacher, and decorated World War II veteran.
Building on the work of Dupuy and his associates, this second edition is
equally welcome. Many things have changed in these last 17 years, and
entries needed to be updated, added, and, in some cases, even deleted.
There are now approximately 3,500 terms as
compared to 2,500 in the first edition. Examples of new entries are Abrams
(M-1); Abu Nidal organization; Fedayeen Saddam; Gulf War; Hawk (MIM-23);
Moro Liberation Front (MLF); Oslo Accords; Scud; and World Trade
Center and Pentagon attacks, 2001. As in the first edition, all
aspects of military affairs are covered: strategy, tactics,
fortifications, weapons, ranks, organization, and administration. The
concise entries are arranged alphabetically, and see and see
also references are included. The definitions emphasize
military meanings and cover military affairs and military history from
ancient times to the present; this is not an entomological dictionary.
Photographs and line drawings illustrate some terms.
This is a very readable book for the
general reader and will make a great addition to public, academic, and
some high-school libraries as well as being useful for military
professionals.
Review from:
Reference Reviews, November 2003
This second edition has more
than 3,500 terms, of which 1,000 have been added to cover developments
since the first edition, 17 years ago. Returning definitions include words
like "tattoo," which is a drumbeat or bugle call at night
signifying that enlisted personnel should go to their quarters, "a
display of military exercises offered as entertainment," and also
represents a major tourist event at the castle in Edinburgh, Scotland
every August. New for this edition is Taliban, "the Islamic
fundamentalist group that ruled most of Afghanistan from September 1996
until expelled by the U.S.-led forces in 2001-2002." A few small
black-and-white illustrations grace the text. One depicts the Gatling gun,
a multibarreled machine gun designed by Richard J. Gatling, patented in
1862 and used by the Union army in the Civil War, while another shows the
Nautilus submarine. Extensive cross-references aid in locating
information. Recommended for high school and perhaps some middle school
students.
Review from: Reference
Reviews (UK) Vol. 18 (2), March 2004
As long as there are wars and
rumours of wars, librarians will need dictionaries of military terms. The
first edition of this one was published in 1986 with 2,500 entries: the
new one has 3,500, stated to cover all aspects of military and naval
affairs from the ancient world to the present, including "strategy,
tactics, weapons, fortifications, organizations, ranks and
administration." These entries are generally quite short, ranging from 15
to 250 words: a small number are illustrated (though it is not always
clear why some subjects suitable for illustration are chosen and others
are not). Thus, in the letter A, we find a mixture of technical terms
(Airspeed), words with a special meaning when used militarily (Acquire—as
for a target), initialisms (AFV), general names (Aircraft carrier) and
specific type names (Abrams—a tank). The great majority of entries relate
to the twentieth century: the text has been so recently revised as to
include some terms from the 2003 Gulf War (Embed), though I could see only
one illustration which, seemed to postdate the first edition. The revision
might have been more thorough: it is not true (as it was in 1986) that the
US Navy still operates battleships and, while Chlorine and Mustard gas are
listed, there are no entries for Sarin or VX. The compilers take it for
granted that their readers are US citizens.
It is an ambitious aim to
include all aspects of such a broad subject, and probably no dictionary
could achieve it fully. If I draw attention to errors and inconsistencies,
this is no mere carping criticism, but to help the compilers improve the
third edition. There are a few significant errors. Some are typographical
(the letter G in the phonetic alphabet is Golf, not Gold), some are
probably the result of over-condensation (it is not made clear that a
fusion bomb is much more powerful than a fission bomb), but some are
plainly wrong (such as the inaccurate explanation of the pre-1864 British
grades of admirals). Strangest of all is the illustration under Military
heraldry of the Scottish Royal Arms, which are described as the "Star of
the Portuguese Order of Christ."
But the inconsistencies in
particular demand more thought on the part of the compilers. They usually
arise when some important members of a general class are included but
others, equally important, are not. Take, for instance, the specific names
and numbers of US aircraft. Many are included, like the B-17 Flying
Fortress and the B-24 Liberator, but, astonishingly, not the B-29
Superfortress (which dropped the Hiroshima bomb). If the F4U Corsair is
included, why not the P-SI Mustang? (indeed, not one of the P series of
fighters is mentioned). Turning to other nations, the (contemporary)
MiG-2S and MiG-29 are included, but no others from the design bureau, even
the MiG-1S, which saw a great deal more action than the other two. If
there is a place for the British Spitfire and the Hurricane, why not the
Mosquito? These are not isolated examples. Among intelligence services
(part of a subject stated to have been enhanced in the second edition) we
find an entry for MIS, but no MI6, KGB, GRU, Spetsnaz or even CIA.
To sum up, this dictionary is
good as far as it goes, but a little more care would have made it even
better, albeit at the cost of a greater increase in size.
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