For more than half a century, the extraordinary range of vocabularies and styles in Joyce's Ulysses has been an object of critical and scholarly attention. For the better part of a decade, R. W. Dent has been gathering documentation on a single aspect of this work, what may loosely be called the "colloquial language." The result of this research, Colloquial Language in Ulysses, as its subtitle implies, is essentially a reference tool.

It uses "colloquial" in the ordinary sense, "characteristic of or appropriate to the spoken language or to writing that seeks the effect of speech; informal." Taking heart in the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary and Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English frequently disagree on the matter, Dent includes as colloquial a great deal that purists might question or disallow.

For the most part, this work provides raw, useful data for Ulysses critics and scholars, but it rarely attempts to perform the work of literary critics. It will make users aware both of new information and of information already available in such reference works as the recently revised OED, for many users not readily accessible. Like the OED itself it is necessarily a work-in-progress, especially in its efforts to provide pre-Ulysses evidence, but it is abundantly useful in its present state.

Most entries supplement - and many correct - entries in its principal predecessor, Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated. Colloquial Language in Ulysses attempts to include all colloquial expressions on which Gifford is seriously inadequate, questionable, or demonstrably mistaken, and all on which the 1988 edition differs substantially from the earlier edition of 1974.