Macropædia

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The 17-volume ''Macropædia'' is the third part of the ''Encyclopædia Britannica''; the other two parts are the 12-volume ''Micropædia'' and the one-volume ''Propædia''. The name ''Macropædia'' is a neologism coined by Mortimer J. Adler from the ancient Greek words for 'large' and 'instruction'. Adler's intention was that the ''Macropædia'' serve students who wish to learn a field in depth; for comparison, the short articles of the ''Micropædia'' are intended for quick fact-checking.

The ''Macropædia'' was introduced in the 15th edition (1974) with 19 volumes having 4,207 articles. In the drastic reorganization of that edition in 1985, these articles were combined and condensed into 17 volumes with roughly 700 articles, ranging in length from 2 to 310 pages. The longest article, on the United States, resulted from the merging of the 50 articles on each state. The articles of the ''Macropædia'' are generally written by named contributors and have references, in contrast to the roughly 65,000 articles of the ''Micropædia'' that have no named contributor and no references. However, some parts of the ''Macropædia'' were written by the editorial staff of the ''Britannica''; such editorial articles are identified by the abbreviation "Ed."

Since its reorganization, the ''Macropædia'' has not remained constant. New articles are constantly being added, whereas older articles are sometimes split, absorbed into other articles or drastically shortened or even deleted. An example of the latter is the 1989 article "Adhesives", which had its own article of seven pages in the 1989 ''Macropædia'' but was merely a page in a different article of the 1991 edition. Provided by Wikipedia