Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2002. — 1603 p.
The present work is a revision of László Országh’s unabridged Hungarian-English Dictionary. Previous revised editions were published in 1963 and 1969. In the last revised edition, that of 1969, only minor changes, such as an erratum and a brief supplement, were made in comparison with the large-scale revision of 1963.
Many of the entries in the 1963 and 1969 editions have by now become obsolete. The world around us has changed considerably, and the vocabulary of both the Hungarian and English languages expanded with it. The number of entries in the present edition remains at 120,000. The reason is that, although we added approximately between 15,000 and 20,000 new words and phrases to the dictionary, we also had to leave out approximately the same number of old ones.
Even more important, the language captured and registered in the previous editions by László Országh - both the Hungarian and English - reflects an older state of the language that is in many ways obsolete. A large number of the idiomatic expressions, grammatical constructions, and word choices in the previous editions, together with their English equivalents, sound dated to contemporary speakers. For this reason, in revising the previous edition we considered it our major job to rid the dictionary of this somewhat “dusty” language and to refresh it with the language of today. It is our hope that in this way the dictionary can again fulfill the most important role of a bilingual dictionary: that of a useful and reliable tool of translation.