At the age of 3 Laurence Urdang displayed a precocious facility with words in a letter that he wrote to his mother. When he grew up, the words were still tumbling from his mind, only now there were far more, and many were elaborate. He loved their precision, their nuances of meaning, their etymology, their sound, even their look and, most of all, their endless variety. So, as a born logophile, a lover of words, it was natural that he should become a lexicographer.

Urdang dedicated his working life to compiling and editing dictionaries and lexicons on all manner of subjects from one on synonyms and antonyms, and a compendium of advertising terms, to a volume of biblical quotations and another on misused and mispronounced words.

His purpose was both scholarly and entertaining; there was a rich seam of whimsy in his character. But there was always a fundamental seriousness of purpose to his work, as exemplified most particularly in what was perhaps his magnum opus: the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 1966. He was the managing editor of the first edition. It was the first dictionary to be compiled with the aid of a computer.

The project took seven years to complete, at a cost of $3 million, and was the largest undertaken by the publisher up till then. The dictionary was 2,091 pages long, contained more than 260,000 definitions and weighed 9¼lb (4.2kg).

Urdang went on to become the founding editor in 1974 of Verbatim, the lively, sophisticated and erudite language quarterly for the general reader that dissects and debates English. Its spring 2008 issue, for example, contains essays on such tantalising subjects as Are Prepositions Necessary; Hanky-Panky, Hugger-Mugger and Other Reduplicative Rhyming Compounds; and Prepopr Splelnig.

In 1977 the Times columnist Bernard Levin (obituary, August 10, 2004) wrote a glowing recommendation for the magazine. In it he said, inter alia: “When I set out for the cave in the Mendips in which I expect to spend my last days I shall take . . . a set of a magazine called Verbatim.”

Philip Howard, a fellow Times columnist and classical scholar, was the London editor of the transatlantic journal for many years and said that for a long time Urdang wrote most of the articles himself. The two of them enjoyed jousting over the precise origins and meanings of words.

In the last issue of the quarterly under Urdang’s editorship (he eventually sold it to a doctor in Wisconsin) he spoke of his pride in finding in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary CD-Rom that Verbatim was cited 121 times as a source for neologisms.

Urdang was also editor of the Oxford Thesaurus, American Edition, 1992, and thus became known as “Thesaurus Rex” among his colleagues.

His playfulness with words is all too evident in his introduction to The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused and Mispronounced Words: “This is not a succedaneum for satisfying the nympholepsy of nullifidians. Rather it is hoped that the haecceity of this enchiridion of arcane and recondite sesquipedalian items will appeal to the oniomania of an eximious Gemeinschaft whose legerity and sophrosyne, whose Sprachgefühl and orexis will find more than fugacious fulfilment among its felicific pages.”

In other words (and very roughly): “This is not a substitute for satisfying the frenzied enthusiasm of the sceptic. Rather, it is hoped that the individuality of this handbook of obscure and uncommon long words will appeal to the compulsive desire to buy things of that distinguished community whose mental agility and discretion, whose intuition of what is the mot juste and whose hunger for knowledge will find more than fleeting satisfaction in its cheerful pages.”

In all Urdang wrote or edited more than 200 reference books and articles on such subjects as allusions, slogans, nicknames, prefixes and suffixes, ologies and isms and a medical and nursing dictionary. His final book, entitled, fittingly, The Last Word, was a characteristically entertaining guide to the obfuscations that he found in so much contemporary writing.