Book excerpt: Webster's New World College Dictionary is a favorite of newsrooms and copyeditors nationwide, and it is the official dictionary of The Associated Press Stylebook.This dictionary features a clear and accessible defining style, abundant synonym notes, full-page tables and charts, hundreds of drawings that complement the definitions, and authoritative guidance on usage and style points. It also includes extensive coverage of Americanisms (words, phrases, and senses coined by an American or first used in the United States). It has added nearly 5,000 new entries, including terms from the areas of arts and sports, science and medicine, computers and the Internet, food, business, politics, and law. Tens of thousands of revisions have been made to existing senses, to bring them up-to-date and to reflect current usage. A reference supplement includes: Rules of punctuation, Roman numerals, Calendars, Monetary units, Currency symbols, Names for large number, Books of the Bible, Meteorological data, Commonly used weights and measures, Planets of the solar system, Geologic time scale, and Periodic table of the elements.