The Complete Plain Words

The Complete Plain Words, titled simply Plain Words in its 2014 revision, is a style guide written by Sir Ernest Gowers, published in 1954. It has never been out of print. It comprises expanded and revised versions of two pamphlets that he wrote at the request of HM Treasury, Plain Words (1948) and ABC of Plain Words (1951). The aim of the book is to help officials in their use of English as a tool of their trade. To keep the work relevant for readers in subsequent decades it has been revised by Sir Bruce Fraser in 1973, by Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut in 1986, and by the original author's great-granddaughter Rebecca Gowers in 2014.

All the editions until that of 2014 were published by Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO). The most recent is issued by an imprint of Penguin Books.

The association of wordiness with bureaucracy has a long history. In the 14th century Geoffrey Chaucer, a prominent civil servant as well as a poet, urged the use of straightforward writing. Reviewing Plain Words in 1948, The Manchester Guardian quoted the French revolutionary Martial Herman writing in 1794:

The nonsensical jargon of the old Ministries must be replaced by a simple style, clear and yet concise, free from expressions of servility, from obsequious formulae, stand-offishness, pedantry, or any suggestion that there is an authority superior to that of reason, or of the order established by law. There must be no conventional phrases, no waste of words.

The British civil service of the 19th and early 20th centuries had a reputation for pomposity and long-windedness in its written communications. In Little Dorritt in the mid-1850s, Charles Dickens caricatured officialdom as the "Circumlocution Office", where for even the most urgent matter nothing could be done without "half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence." By the 1880s the term "officialese" was in use, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as, "The formal and typically verbose language considered characteristic of officials or official documents".

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