Encyclopædia Britannica it is scarcely used, and reviewers have recommended that it be dropped from the encyclopaedia. The also has color transparencies of human anatomy and several appendices listing the staff members, advisors, and contributors to all three parts of the Britannica. Taken together, the and comprise roughly 40 million words and 24,000 images. The two-volume index has 2,350 pages, listing the 228,274 topics covered in the "Britannica", together with 474,675 subentries under those topics. The "Britannica" generally prefers British spelling over American; for example, it uses "colour" (not "color"), "centre" (not "center"), and "encyclopaedia" (not "encyclopedia"). However, there are exceptions to
History of the Encyclopædia Britannica an organization that likely inspired the "new plan" of the "Britannica". The first encyclopedia to include biographies of living people was the 64-volume "Grosses Universal-Lexicon" (published 1732–1759) of Johann Heinrich Zedler, who argued that death alone should not render people notable. The "Britannica" was the idea of Colin Macfarquhar, a bookseller and printer, and Andrew Bell, an engraver, both of Edinburgh. They conceived of the "Britannica" as a conservative reaction to the French "Encyclopédie" of Denis Diderot (published 1751–1766), which was widely viewed as heretical. Ironically, the "Encyclopédie" had begun as a French translation of the popular English encyclopedia, "Cyclopaedia"