In essentials, Fowler's Modern English usage can never be out of date, for his primary concern was to teach clear thinking and the orderly use of precise words, and to castigate whatever is slovenly., pretentious or pedantic. But the conventions of grammar and vocabulary that he called usage never stand still, and it is now 35 years since he wrote. Constructions condemned as solecistic, for example, have forced their way into idiom. Slipshod extensions have won a respected place in our vocabulary. Vogue works have fallen out of fashion and others have taken their place. Popularised technicalities have proliferated. The alterations and additions made in this revision represent an attempt to do what we may suppose Fowler himself would have wished to do if he had been alive today, to keep his book abreast of present day usage.