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There is "Director's cut" for movies and "minority report/dissenting opinion" for legal issues. What do you call a (longer) report, where the author states some things a little (or very) different than the official, published version? Think of a company selling hammers and publishing a report titled Hitting a Hammer On Your Thumb is Not Dangerous, where the conditions "padded hammer, padded thumb, just slight touch" have been edited out. If the author is even allowed to publish her/his own version, you would not call that book a "Director's cut" (because it is a book and not a film).

This is not a single-word-request: The answer may consist of several words (but, if it is possible, not of a whole paragraph, please). In case there really is a single word for this type of report/book, I would also accept that, of course.

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  • Another phrase used in court opinions is "concurring opinion".
    – MetaEd
    Jan 31, 2012 at 18:55
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    If the shorter report is an abridgement of the author's full report, and the full report is published as well, then it is the unabridged edition.
    – MetaEd
    Jan 31, 2012 at 18:56
  • @MetaEd: unabridged edition is good! Because you suggested it before Robusto, you could also post it as answer. (I will wait before accepting an answer, because some genius might have some even better answer.)
    – Stephen
    Jan 31, 2012 at 19:01
  • For journal articles, the fuller version that was not published is often a 'technical report' (contains all the figures and proofs and such that were edited out for the print version). Though not synonymous, this is also sometimes called a 'preprint'.
    – Mitch
    Jan 31, 2012 at 19:31
  • @Stephen Thank you, but it's a cooperative effort and I have nothing to add to Robusto's answer. Cheers.
    – MetaEd
    Jan 31, 2012 at 19:57

3 Answers 3

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You could say that the book is uncensored, unexpurgated, unabridged, or even unedited.

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  • Note that at its broadest, "censored" means that something was removed from the text for moral or national security reasons or something analaogous. I guess your example of a hammer manufacturer's conspiracy to suppress information about their product could be called "censorship". But you wouldn't call it censorship if material was dropped because the publisher thought the book was too long to be marketable, or because the editor thought it was boring. More strictly, censorship means suppression of information by force. i.e. if the government passes laws restrictring what (continued)
    – Jay
    Jan 31, 2012 at 22:31
  • (continued) you can print, that's censorship. If you post a question on english.stackexchange.com asking how to repair a diesel engine and the moderator deletes it as not relevant to the site, that's not "censorship", that's editorial discretion.
    – Jay
    Jan 31, 2012 at 22:33
  • @Jay: Everything depends on the context, which is why I offered a number of possibilities. Also, I think you mean the OP's example of a hammer manufacturer's conspiracy, not mine.
    – Robusto
    Jan 31, 2012 at 22:42
  • I wasn't disagreeing with you, just clarifying. And yes, I conflated you and the OP RE "your example".
    – Jay
    Feb 1, 2012 at 15:27
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When the 30th Anniversary Edition of Stranger in a Strange Land was released with 50,000 words restored from the original manuscript, it was referred to as the "uncut" edition.

The Stand also had a similar treatment, and is marketed as "The Complete and Uncut Edition."

It seems uncut is the accepted term in the publishing industry.

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  • Uncut tends to suggest that at least some of the text in the uncut version was removed for censorship reasons. In the case of Stranger in a Strange Land that's probably true - Heinlien was starting to get a bit raunchy by then. Publishers probably like it because they might get some extra sales to readers who're hoping for a more salacious book. Unabridged doesn't have so much of that connotation - often it just means the original was shortened for convenience or some other reason.
    – FumbleFingers
    Jan 31, 2012 at 19:36
  • @FumbleFingers The Stand was originally cut because Stephen King's publisher thought that the public would be averse to such a long book. Apparently, Heinlein's publisher thought the same.
    – Gnawme
    Jan 31, 2012 at 19:44
  • Hmm. Well I recall that lots of his earlier books were quite short - as were lots of sci-fi books from that time. But some of the later ones were truly weighty tomes - the sort of book you could confidently assume would do for "holiday reading" all on its own!
    – FumbleFingers
    Jan 31, 2012 at 20:39
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    Given the airlines' weight restrictions on luggage, it's difficult to take your typical door-stopper tome with you on holiday anymore. I'd almost consider getting an e-reader just to keep my shelves from sagging under the weight of the multi-volume epics that seem to be de rigueur in fantasy these days.
    – Gnawme
    Jan 31, 2012 at 21:00
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I'd call it an "expanded edition".

When I hear the term "unabridged edition", I understand that to mean that this is the edition that was originally published, then an abridged edition was published, and now the publisher wants to make clear that this particular copy is the full text. If you added additional information to the original publication, I don't think it would be appropriate to call that "unabridged", because the original was not abridged from anything else. Maybe this becomes debatable if the author writes a document, an editor cuts sections out, this shortened version is published, and then later the original, longer version is published.

(Publishers often print "complete and unabridged" on book covers, which is a little redundant. As opposed to "complete and abridged"? I once read a joke book that had printed on the cover "completely abridged" crossed out, then "incompletely abridged" also crossed out, then "all of it".)

Note that a "dissenting opinion" is not an expanded version of the ruling of a court, but rather a separate document written by one or more judges in which they express disagreement with the majority of the judges on the panel. As MetaEd notes, there are also "concurring opinions", in which a judge writes how he agrees with the ultimate decision of the majority but disagrees on the legal basis for the decision, or has some other point he wants to make. (There are also opinions "concurring in part and dissenting in part", "concurring in part and concurring in the judgement", etc.)

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