THE THIRD College Edition of Webster's New World Dictionary was published by Simon & Schuster in September 1988. The work contains 170,000 entries and 800 illustrations in 1600 pages. Recent college dictionaries have contained about 150,000 entries. The increase is due in part to the steady proliferation of the vocabulary and in part to competition among the four rivals. The others are American Heritage Dictionary, College Edition (Houghton Mifflin, published in 1982); Random House College Dictionary (1984), and Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Merriam-Webster, 1983). By comparison, Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828, contained 70,000 words. The college dictionary is one of a family of New World dictionaries that have sold more than 80 million copies since 1951.