The Pocket Oxford American Dictionary of Current English

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Summary: A CONCISE YET EXTENSIVE REFERENCE
Review: Exhaustively researched and holding some 175,000 precise definitions and entries, The Oxford American Dictionary is an appropriate resource for home, office, and dorm room. Known for its au currant listings, Oxford is always in the process of gauging growth and change in our language. Just think of the words that the internet has added to our vocabularies - to say nothing of scientific research and rap! Each entry includes a pronunciation guide, grammatical identity, and syllabication. Also found are inflected forms, variant spellings, and derivatives. Biographical entries begin with Hank Aaron and end with Zoroaster, while Geographical entries range from Aachen (a town in West Germany) to Zurich. Handy tables offer metric weights and measures as well as conversion from metric to standard measurements. Chemical elements are listed as well as countries of the world. Want to know who our 12th president was? You'll find it here. Oxford boasts more than 100 staff lexicographers plus hundreds of readers and researchers. All that expertise shows in this concise yet extensive dictionary. - Gail Cooke

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Summary: This dictionary can be frustrating!
Review: I like dictionaries, but this one seems to annoy me on a regular basis. Half the time, the word I am looking up simply is not in the book, and often the word is fairly common. So I'm faced with the mystery of why the word was omitted, and why I spent $9.95 on this when so many other great dictionaries are out there. So my advice is to spend time at the bookstore thumbing through the dictionaries, and there's no doubt you can find a more comprehensive one than this. (Also, why is this called a POCKET dictionary? It's quite large. The only pocket it could fit in would be a kangaroo's.)

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Summary: AN investment in SIMPLY PERFECT SPELLLLINGGGGG
Review: superb, it cuts out the fat, and goes right to the meat, which is what dictionary, is suppose to do, BUY IT BUY IT BUY IT, you will not be sorry. I refer to it on a daily basis, I am a stickler for SPELLING each and every word correctly.