DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN NAVAL FIGHTING SHIPS

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The '''Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships''' ('''DANFS''' for short) is the primary reference work for the basic facts about every ship ever used by the United States Navy. Although called a dictionary, it is more accurately described as a specialized encyclopedia. In addition to the ship entries, ''DANFS'' includes appendices on small craft, histories of Confederate Navy ships, and various essays related to naval ships.

Contents

Publication data

Reference use

References

External links

Publication data

''DANFS'' was originally released by the Naval Historical Center (NHC) in bound hardcover volumes, ordered by ship name, from Volume I (A-B) published in 1959 to Volume VII (T-Z) published in 1981. Volume I (A-B) subsequently went out of print. In 1991 a revised ''Volume I Part A'', covering only ship names beginning with A, was released. Work continues on revisions of the remaining volumes.
Volunteers at the Hazegray website undertook to transcribe the ''DANFS'' and make it available on the World Wide Web. The project goal is a direct transcription of the ''DANFS'', with changes limited to correcting typographical errors and editorial notes for incorrect facts in the original.
Subsequently, the NHC developed an online version of ''DANFS'' through a combination of optical character recognition (OCR) and hand transcription. The NHC is slowly updating its online ''DANFS'' to correct errors and take into account the gap in time between its publication and the present date. NHC prioritizes updates as follows: ships currently in commission, ships that came into commission after the volume (missing), ships decommissioned after the volume (incomplete), and finally updates to older ships.^[1] The NHC has begun a related project to place Ship History and Command Operations Reports online at their ''DANFS'' site.

Volume	Date	Ships	Notes
I	1959	A-B	Out of print
II	1963	C-F
III	1968	G-K
IV	1969	L-M
V	1970	N-Q
VI	1976	R-S
VII	1981	T-Z
I-A	1991	A
Hazegray		A-Z	Ship histories end at dates above
Naval Historical Center		A-Z	Ship histories being brought up to date

Reference use

Because ''DANFS'' is a work of the U.S. government, its content is in the public domain, and its articles are often quoted verbatim in other works. Many websites organized by former and active crew members of U.S. Navy vessels include a copy of their ship's ''DANFS'' article. Editors of Wikipedia often use the ''DANFS'' entry as a starting point for ship articles (''e.g.''
USS ''G-1'' (SS-19½).^[2]

References

1. Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships - Editorial Note
2. USS G-1 (SS-19½) Revision history the Epopt, writing for Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia )

External links

★ US Naval Historical Center DANFS Site (''DANFS'' maintainer)

★ Hazegray DANFS Site