tended for the use of persons interested in the more prominent of these two subjects, and as the more prominent of them seems to be dynamic flight or aviation in the narrower or more 'proper' sense, rather than aeronautics or aerostation and air-sailing generally, in the regular old-fashiond sense, I do not now hesitate to call the book a Dictionary of Aviation. To put the thing in other words, aeronautics seems to me to be getting to be considerd merely as a side-show or old-fashioned aspect of aviation, and I therefore make this book primarily for the aviators and their kindred, rather than for the aeronauts and balloonists. A further reason for the adoption of this title is the fact that the word aviation has itself come to be used sometimes as the more inclusiv term, embracing aeronautics and ballooning, as well as dynamic flight; and it seems to me likely that this inclusiv sense of the word aviation will become quite common, especially as, historically, the attempts at dynamic flight seem to antedate, or at least predominate over, the idea of aerostation.
As there apparently exists no dictionary of meteorology, and as the subject is of great importance in aviation, the number of meteorologic terms in this dictionary is larger than might otherwise be necessary.
Aviation will most likely give rise to a group of arts and industries of titanic proportions and become a factor of prodigious power in the evolution of mankind. For this reason it is interesting to show its terminology somewhat folly. Hence the vocabulary of this dictionary includes words useful to writers and translators of books and articles on aviation as well as to aviators themselvs. It is the undifferentiated vocabulary not alone of a great manufacturing industry, a great sport, a great military factor; but also of a new mode of life of mankind: of romance, and travel, and fancy.
Aviation lends itself with peculiar ease not only to imaginativ and poetic literature, but to sociologic speculation, and I merely record the words and frases which I have found in actual use in the literature of aviation and of certain fases of all these other closely allied subjects.
