Cassell's French Dictionary : French-English, English-French

Rating:
Summary: Some of you are younger than this dictionary
Review: Buried on the copyright page is the most fascinating fact in this book: that a major publishing house has the gall to keep the words "entirely new" on the dust-jacket of a dictionary it hasn't revised in twenty-seven years.

It's so old that the entry for the word "microwave" doesn't mention ovens. This is a fine dictionary as far as it goes. Unfortunately, as far as it goes is the Carter administration.

If you're a professional translator who needs a shelf full of lexicons, it's a useful volume. But if you're only going to get one French-English / English-French dictionary, this emphatically should *not* be it.

Rating:
Summary: Another opinion
Review: I disagree with the previous reviews. A bilingual dictionary is rarely of use to a writer, and is of use to a reader only as a complement to a pair of good single-language dictionaries. Although it may fail as a tourist's companion, the Cassell's serves my purposes as a reader well. The many dated idioms/definitions are rarely archaic, and don't detract from the clarity and completeness of the text; what's more, the understanding of a word requires some knowledge of its history. "All the world over," by the way, is translated "dans le monde entier."

Rating:
Summary: au contraire, c'est un dictionnaire très utile
Review: This dictionary contains a plethora of easily found phrases, and often have I vainly searched for a word, such as "calmande," for example, and have found in in Cassell's. It is not the most modern of dictionaries, and as a previous reviewer said, for more modern translation, a dictionary such as Collins-Robert is useful. But for reading most French literary works, Cassell's is quite sufficient and often extremely useful.