Perhaps this might vary country to country, but is there an official standard in existence? Certain companies such as oxford, make mistakes so it is hard to use them as a referrence due to lack of proffesionalsism.
I am needing it for work as sometimes with contracts various words must be very well defined.
Example:
It’s British English. It’s just the polite way to say that women may also be eaten.
You’ll never find a perfect dictionary. Just get a few and cross check.
Issue is with Meat: …animal or a bird… Birds are animals. in actual fact, despite nationality or cultural opinions. Makes no sense.
Always crosschecking, which oftentimes means citing research and journals which all too often becomes very time consuming.
I was wondering if in certain countries the government will state ABC companys dictionary is the standard for our countrys english.
Such as the UK: Oxford
Or something along those lines to standardize everything
That’s the cheap, dumbed-down version of the OED. Have you tried the proper one?
The first electronic version of the dictionary was made available in 1988. The online version has been available since 2000, and as of April 2014 was receiving over two million visits per month. The third edition of the dictionary will most likely only appear in electronic form; the Chief Executive of Oxford University Press has stated that it is unlikely that it will ever be printed.[1][4][5]
Wiktionary is pretty good now, though like all of Wikiland it can theoretically be graffiti-ed up at any time.
The online dictionaries are a weird world of licensing - I suspect at this stage “Oxford” doesn’t mean much when tagged on to a random book title.
The gold standard is, as @yyy said, the OED. But while it’s a wonderful resource, it’s also serious overkill, unless you want to track down the earliest known use of a word with that definition. It’s expensive - USD$90 per year.
I probably see Merriam-Webster referred to the most for American English, and it hasn’t suffered the same degree of brand dilution as Oxford has.
Oh, so that’s why they don’t plan to print it again. Why sell lifetime ownership of a text when you can rent it out for periods too short for most people to read 1% of it?
Brilliant. 
If you object to that, you should see the shit they (Elsevier, nature, Wiley, etc.) get up to in academic journal land.
but they do have nice offices and so on.
Well, it does change pretty quickly as well. And does anyone other than libraries buy the full text? The compact version is two big volumes, weighing three pounds. The full version is, if I’m looking at the right Amazon link, 20 volumes.
$10, maybe $20 for a year, I’d get the subscription. But $90, nope, way too high.
I occasionally get dirty looks for suggesting that the term “predatory journal” is redundant.
In iOS, I’ve never found a dictionary app that I like; there are some that are pricy enough that they seem promising, but having paid $30 or so for a dictionary app in early iOS days, and then that app broke one update later, nope. Not doing that again.
You may also want to look into word usage books like “Fowler’s Modern English Usage” or “Garner’s Modern American Usage” to see if they help. If you’re writing in British English, then Fowler’s covers both American and British English(although I think the new edition of Garner’s does as well).
My company follows American Medical Association style, which I believe mentions Merriam-Webster Collegiate as the default.
They also mention American Heritage for some uses (prefixes and suffixes) and Dorland’s or Stedman’s for medical terms.
When working with advanced learners of English, I adore using a corpus based dictionary such as the Collins Cobuild English Dictionary for Advanced Learners. Every definition has a real world example or examples; each noun is distinguished as countable or uncountable; each verb is indicated as transitive or intransitive. It’s a brilliant resource.
Guy
