Philip Babcock Gove

Philip Babcock Gove is best known for serving as the editor-in-chief of Webster's Third New International Dictionary, which was published in 1961. This massive dictionary was a landmark achievement in American lexicography. Gove spent over a decade overseeing the project and its revolutionary inclusion of descriptivist language rules.

The dictionary was highly controversial because Gove abandoned the prescriptive approach of previous editions in favor of a descriptivist approach. This meant he included slang, non-standard dialects, and eliminated usage labels like 'colloquial.' Traditionalists were outraged that the dictionary legitimized phrases like 'ain't,' sparking a massive cultural debate in the 1960s.

Gove began working for the G. & C. Merriam Company in 1946 and took over the editorship of the Third New International Dictionary in the early 1950s. He remained at the helm until the massive text was finally published in 1961. His tenure marked a massive shift in how dictionaries recorded the English language.

Webster's Third New International Dictionary contained over 450,000 entries, making it the largest single-volume dictionary of the English language at the time of its publication. It required over 200 people to compile and edit the millions of citations used as evidence. The final text was so large it required a completely new typeface to fit on the pages.