The Columbia Encyclopedia is a one-volume encyclopedia produced by Columbia University Press and sold by the Gale Group. First published in 1935, and continuing its important relationship with Columbia University, the encyclopedia underwent major revisions in 1950 and 1963; the current edition is the sixth, printed in 2000. It contains over 51,000 articles totaling some 6.5 million words and has also been published in two volumes.

An electronic version of the encyclopedia is available and is licensed by several different companies for use over the World Wide Web. See External links below. This edition, which is marked up in SGML, is updated on a quarterly basis and contains over 84,000 hyperlinked cross-references. Unlike many other major English-language encyclopedias, the complete content of the Columbia encyclopedia is available online to individual users without payment. (Most others make a subset of their content available, and the user is from time to time informed that more content is only available to subscribers.)