use-icon

HOW TO USE THE DICTIONARY

To look up an entry in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, use the search window above. For best results, after typing in the word, click on the “Search” button instead of using the “enter” key.

Some compound words (like bus rapid transit, dog whistle, or identity theft) don’t appear on the drop-down list when you type them in the search bar. For best results with compound words, place a quotation mark before the compound word in the search window.

guide to the dictionary

use-icon

THE USAGE PANEL

The Usage Panel is a group of nearly 200 prominent scholars, creative writers, journalists, diplomats, and others in occupations requiring mastery of language. Annual surveys have gauged the acceptability of particular usages and grammatical constructions.

The Panelists

open-icon

AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY APP

The new American Heritage Dictionary app is now available for iOS and Android.

scroll-icon

THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY BLOG

The articles in our blog examine new words, revised definitions, interesting images from the fifth edition, discussions of usage, and more.

100-words-icon

See word lists from the best-selling 100 Words Series!

Find out more!

open-icon

INTERESTED IN DICTIONARIES?

Check out the Dictionary Society of North America at http://www.dictionarysociety.com

not (nŏt)
Share:
adv.
In no way; to no degree. Used to express negation, denial, refusal, or prohibition: I will not go. You may not have any.

[Middle English, alteration of naught, nought; see NAUGHT.]

Usage Note: The positioning of not and other negatives in a sentence is important to avoid ambiguity. The sentence All classes are not open to enrollment could be taken to mean either "All classes are closed to enrollment" or "Not all classes are open to enrollment." Similarly, the sentence Kim didn't sleep until noon could mean either "Kim went to sleep at noon" or "Kim got up before noon." · Not only and but also are usually classified as correlative conjunctions. They add emphasis to each part of the construction and suggest that the second part is particularly unexpected or surprising. As with both ... and and other correlatives, parallelism requires that each conjunction be followed by a construction of the same grammatical type. Thus, She not only bought a new car but also a new lawnmower displays faulty parallelism, where She bought not only a new car but also a new lawnmower does not, because both not only and but also are followed by noun phrases. See Usage Note at only.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition copyright ©2022 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
 

Indo-European & Semitic Roots Appendices

    Thousands of entries in the dictionary include etymologies that trace their origins back to reconstructed proto-languages. You can obtain more information about these forms in our online appendices:

    Indo-European Roots

    Semitic Roots

    The Indo-European appendix covers nearly half of the Indo-European roots that have left their mark on English words. A more complete treatment of Indo-European roots and the English words derived from them is available in our Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.