However, Mullan also argued that by 2002 the dictionary entries were growing continually further out of date and out of touch with modern slang usages. In a 2002 review of the eighth edition, University College London Professor of English John Mullan argued that the "strength and weakness" of the dictionary was Partridge's "willingness to include his opinions in what presented itself as a work of reference". In 1985, John Gross of The New York Times called A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English "the nearest thing to a standard work in its field". Literary critic Edmund Wilson praised the dictionary, stating that the work "ought to be acquired by every reader who wants his library to have a sound lexicographical foundation". The New York Times offered a "glowing" review of the 1937 first edition. For the two editions published before the Second World War, obscenity laws prohibited full printing of vulgar words Partridge therefore substituted asterisks for the vowels of words considered obscene. The dictionary was "regarded as filling a lexicographical gap" in the English language because it contained entries on words that had long been omitted from other works, such as the Oxford English Dictionary. Partridge published seven editions of his "hugely influential" slang dictionary before his death in 1979.
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