In many ways, this book is more like an encyclopedia than a dictionary, with substantial material presented on a wide range of topics related to the historical evolution of variation in English as well as the description of many varieties of English around the world. It begins with 15 maps, showing places such as Britain, Ireland, North America, South Africa, India and Australia. There is then a short introduction, briefly discussing issues such as language variation and change, the development of a standard, and post-colonial varieties of English. The bulk of the book consists of 2058 alphabetical entries, starting with ‘/æ/ before voiceless fricatives’ and ending with ‘Zurich English Newspaper Corpus’. After these alphabetical entries, there are three short appendices that deal with aspects of transcription. Finally, there are substantial Reference Guides listing a huge range of published materials under various categories, such as General, the Celtic Realms, North America, and English in Asia, which are then divided into sub-categories and sub-sub-categories.

The 2058 entries vary considerably in length. Some offer just brief definitions, such as ‘dorsal’ which is defined as ‘A label referring to the back of the tongue’, ‘kinesics’ which refers to ‘The use of facial expressions, movements and gestures of the body to convey additional shades of meaning or emphasis to what one says’, and ‘phone’ which is ‘Any human sound which has not been classified in the phonology of a language’. However, many of the other entries are much longer. The longest is that on ‘American English’, which extends to over three pages, providing detailed information on the historical background, dialectal range and overviews of the pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary of this variety of English; and the entries on ‘Australian English’ and ‘Irish English’ are not much shorter. Sadly, there is no mention of Brunei English. Perhaps Brunei is considered too small to warrant discussion, though one might note that ‘Kiribati’, ‘Norfolk Island’, ‘St Helena’, and ‘St Vincent and Grenadines’ all have short entries even though their populations are considerably smaller than that of Brunei.

Each of the 27 lexical sets for vowels suggested by Wells (Reference Wells1982), such as fleece, kit and dress, gets a separate entry, describing the typical pronunciation, giving a few example words, and discussing some of the variation that is found for its realisation in different Englishes. There are also entries for processes that affect these lexical sets, such as the ‘fleece–kit merger’ for a lack of distinction between long and short vowels, the ‘foot–strut split’ for the use of an open vowel in words such as cut, and ‘goose-fronting’ for the pronunciation at the front of the mouth of the vowel in words such as fool. Some of the entries on processes make reference to lexical keywords outside the original set established by Wells, including entries on the ‘laugh-shift’ to refer to loss of the original /x/ in words such as laugh, dough and daughter, ‘catch-raising’ for the use of a relatively non-open vowel in southern English English in words such as catch from the eighteenth century onwards, and the ‘mary–merry–marry merger’ to describe the lack of a distinction between Mary, merry and marry that is found in parts of the United States. This introduction of additional lexical keywords illustrates the limitations of the original keywords and how they must be extended in order to adequately describe the pronunciation of English around the world. As with other aspects of the book, the inclusion of entries on all these processes represents a vast array of meticulously described material on the pronunciation of English in a wide range of different varieties.

There are 92 entries for individual people, including key historical figures in the description of varieties of English such as Otto Jesperson, Daniel Jones, Henry Sweet and Noah Webster. While some living linguists are included, such as Derek Bickerton, Braj Kachru, William Labov and Walt Wolfram, the youngest one is Peter Trudgill (born in 1943), so younger scholars do not get an entry, however eminent they might be. For example, although Edgar Schneider's work is discussed in the entry for the ‘dynamic model’, he himself does not have a separate entry. Furthermore, the focus of the book is firmly on describing varieties of English, so there is no entry for Noam Chomsky, just as there is none for ‘generative grammar’ or ‘transformational grammar’.

There are entries on a huge range of topics, including ‘accusative’, ‘acronym’, ‘Bermuda’, ‘calques’, ‘deictic pronouns’, ‘Geordie’, ‘implicational scale’, ‘language shift’, ‘larynx’, ‘matched-guise technique’, ‘Pacific creoles’, ‘palatalization’, ‘relative pronoun’, ‘sexism in language’, ‘spectrogram’, ‘Tonga’, ‘unique morph’, ‘yod dropping’, ‘zero marking’ and many, many more, and all of the entries have obviously been written with immense care. It is perhaps surprising that there is no entry for ‘English as a Lingua Franca’ or for the ‘Lingua Franca Core’, the set of phonological features that Jenkins (Reference Jenkins2000) suggests are vital for intelligibility in English as an International Language; but it would be churlish to suggest a few missing entries such as these when so much fascinating material is collated in this volume. Indeed, all the material is presented clearly and with great authority, and I have already found many of the entries extremely useful.

While the Reference Guides at the end of the book represent an exceptionally valuable resource for the researcher, the division into sub-categories and sub-sub-categories makes it rather hard at times to track down a specific item. For example, under the entry for ‘simplification, phonological’, we find a citation to Schreier (Reference Schreier and Hickey2012). But under which of the reference categories should we look for Schreier (Reference Schreier and Hickey2012)? I eventually managed to find it under Section 1.6 ‘Studies of linguistic features’, but it took me several minutes of searching through all of the various categories and sub-categories of references before I could locate it. One other comment about the Reference Guides: all the entries seem to be to published materials, so there is no mention of any electronic sites, which seems to overlook a rather important source of data in the modern world; but perhaps web-based materials are deemed insufficiently reliable for inclusion in a book such as this.

In conclusion, this book contains an immense amount of fascinating and exceptionally valuable information about the historical development of variation in English and also about features of World Englishes and current phenomena affecting varieties of English around the world. While some people might note that a few topics are omitted, such as an entry on ‘Brunei English’ or ‘English as a Lingua Franca’, one must admit that not everything can be described in a book such as this, and what has been included represents an impressive collation of material that many researchers will find extremely valuable.