NEW YORK -- During the 44 years she has commuted to work on public transportation, Leonore Hauck has been exposed repeatedly to language that the dictionary calls "vulgar" or "slang." Even though Ms. Hauck says she's "still of an age where I don't like to hear them," she isn't repelled by the four- or six- or 12-letter words that are so popular on the buses, subways and sidewalks of Manhattan. On the contrary, she's a connoisseur, habitually jotting down new or imaginative improvisations on rude or obscene language.

"Anything is grist for the mill," explained Ms. Hauck, whose latest mill" is the Random House Webster's College Dictionary, one of numerous reference books on which she has labored at the publishing house. Having been managing editor of both the college dictionary and the second edition of the Random House unabridged, published in 1987, Ms. Hauck has not only heard every word in the book, she has been partly responsible for many of the more offensive ones showing up in it.

Talking about how obscenities have become commonplace in dictionaries, to the dismay of hard-core Grundys ("narrow-minded conventional" people, according to the new Random House), Ms. Hauck recited a number of variations on one outhouse expletive, pairing it with such suffixes as "-face" and "-kicker."

In a more genteel era, Ms. Hauck's indelicate language might have seemed shocking, coming so matter-of-factly from the lips of a woman of her educational background (Queens College, Class of 1947), agreeable disposition and obvious propriety.

But it is just such sexist attitudes and stereotypes that Ms. Hauck and her colleagues in the reference department at Random House were striving to define, evade and vanquish with their college dictionary. The appendix has a section entitled "Avoiding Sexist Language," which advises users who want to skirt the gender trap to substitute "housekeeper" for "cleaning woman" and "bellhop" for "bellboy" and to refrain altogether from "girl" (for adult woman), "distaff" and "coed."

While receiving many good words in their efforts to be ecumenical, up to the minute and sexually demilitarized, Ms. Hauck and her fellow editors have also been publicly spanked for "sanctioning the jargon of special interest groups" (the New York Times) and "lending authority to scores of questionable usages" (Time).

Among the more questionable are those from one special interest group in particular, feminists, who were largely responsible for "womyn," "herstory," "waitron" and numerous other coinages that some purists find worse than obscene.

As a result of these and hundreds of other neologisms, buzz words and folk idioms -- "wannabe," "dollarization," "wuss," "malling" and "dumb down" among them -- the Random House has become widely, and unflatteringly, labeled the first "politically correct," or PC, dictionary.

It wasn't simply that the editors were the first to define the term ("adj. marked by or adhering to a typically progressive orthodoxy on issues involving esp. race, gender, sexual affinity or ecology") but that they betrayed an eagerness to assert their own political correctness.

Ms. Hauck insists otherwise, saying that critics and the media have "almost willfully misinterpreted and distorted" the sexier and more provocative aspects of the Random House college dictionary, while overlooking its "tremendous value" as an advisory reference to the permutations and nuances of the language.

"The idea that we're kowtowing to these special interest groups is absolutely incorrect," Ms. Hauck said, offering the editors' standard description of a dictionary as "descriptive" rather than "prescriptive" and explaining: "We're merely saying that certain words can be used or spelled in certain ways. We don't say they should be used or spelled that way, that you should throw out 'women' for 'womyn.' "

Like many dictionaries before it, the new Random House has also been flailed for its "ethnic incorrectness," detractors claiming that the inclusion of such epithets as "wop," "honky," and "nigger" automatically means they're being certified as legitimate synonyms.

"We have what is practically a form letter," Ms. Hauck reported, "saying that long ago we had to decide that it's better to put those words in the dictionary and unequivocally tell people they're offensive and derogatory, rather than make believe they don't exist."

A similar philosophy holds for such slightly less volatile words as "hopefully" (used as a "sentence modifier"), "finalize," "downsize" and "parameter" (for limit), among the dozens of others that turn up in the Random House college dictionary, with or without the blessings of the editors.

Sol Steinmetz, executive editor of the Random House college dictionary, said: "We're not chasing after what's popular and fashionable. We're chasing after usages that occur in the language, which changes all the time, usages that need to be recorded for the sake of people who come across these words in their reading and want to look them up."

Controversial or dubious usages are usually accompanied by a warning, Mr. Steinmetz added. "We're alerting people that they use these words at their own risk. They have social, political or racial overtones, and some people will get angry or emotional if you use them."

The dictionary's associate publisher, John L. Hornor, learned firsthand just how emotional. He was point man ("n. . . . the lead soldier of an infantry patrol on combat operations") in promoting and defending its innovations when the reference work reached bookstores last May.

jTC Though many of the interviewers were sympathetic enough, Mr. Hornor, a former Bible and encyclopedia salesman, often found himself on the firing line, having to justify such red-flag words as "herstory," "lemme" and "humankind," along with the editors' various other stratagems to avoid the sexist "man" (as in "cleric" for "clergyman" and "artificial" for "man-made").

The most uncomfortable encounter came on the "Today" show, Mr. Hornor said, where he was interrogated by an "imperious" Bryant Gumbel. "I avoided annihilation," he reported. "And as I got up to go, he grabbed me by the arm and in a completely different tone, asked, 'Can I use "impact" as a verb?' 'Of course you can,' I told him. And he got so excited, he ran over to tell Katie Couric it was OK."

From a filing cabinet in his office, Mr. Steinmetz retrieves what may be a prototypical letter from a dissatisfied consumer. A free-lance writer, the correspondent accused the editors of advocating a Dr. Spock-like permissiveness and deplored the "misspellings of 'womyn' for women and all the other ridiculous aberrations, changes, etc., you have, in a way, endorsed."

Mr. Steinmetz, a congenial man who holds a doctorate from Columbia University and whose curriculum vitae includes stints as general editor of the World Book Dictionary and managing editor of the Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, seemed more amused than affronted by the broadside. He pointed out that in earlier times, pedantic objections had also been raised to "Franklin's electrician, Jefferson's belittle, and Webster's demoralize."

"To be honest, I have very few prejudices about the use of words," said Mr. Steinmetz, who describes himself as such an incorrigible "word hound" that he has turned into a nocturnal animal. "I like to read in bed, but it's no good. Every time I see a strange word or usage I have to reach for a pencil and start marking it."

Even if she doesn't lose any sleep over the job, Ms. Hauck is equally compulsive in her search for "citations" ("quotation(s) showing a particular word or phrase in context"). A rich source for citations, the newspaper had yielded two nuggets that very morning: "grifter," substituting for con man in a TV review; and "expediter," a person who cuts through red tape, which appeared in a real estate column.

For Mr. Steinmetz, Ms. Hauck and the other staff lexicographers, the computer was the great expediter in assembling the more than 180,000 entries in the Random House dictionary, reputedly the first American college dictionary that's totally "on-line" ("adj. operating under the direct control of, or connected to, a main computer").

Because the text is available on a computer data base, revisions that used to take weeks or months can now be made electronically in a matter of days, hours or minutes, Mr. Steinmetz said.

When the Berlin Wall collapsed a year ago, the dictionary was in the late stages of production, but the computer made it relatively simple to change the reference to East (and West) Germany as a "former country (republic) in Central Europe . . . reunited with West (East) Germany in 1990."

Thanks to the computer, the editors could note the death of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the passing of apartheid as a "rigid policy" of South Africa in the dictionary's third printing. But it was too late to record the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party.