<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: absolutely brilliant dictionary
Review: I had to laugh reading the first review of this dictionary, because that was EXACTLY my reaction when I first installed mine. I even wrote a VERY angry letter to Oxford about it, and they replied quite promptly and politely. The thing is, YOU HAVE TO RE-START YOUR COMPUTER ONCE YOU HAVE INSTALLED THIS SOFTWARE FOR IT TO WORK PROPERLY!! So the joke was on me, next time I turned on my computer (in time to get the very polite e-mail from Oxford), because by then it worked perfectly. I am a writer and proofreader, and this dictionary has become one of the most valuable tools I have.Each entry includes pronounciation, part of speech, variant spellings, definition, derivatives and often etymology as well. Lots of slang words are also included, which can be very helpful when dealing with things written in dialect or *ahem* rather creatively. It is SO easy -- you just double-click on a word in your text, and INSTANT DEFINITION (and spelling)!! YAY!! This dictionary has EVERYTHING, and is international in that it has ALL English words, whether they be British, American, Australian, whatever. I love this thing, and everyone I know who has tried it does, too. Absolutely invaluable.
Rating: 
Summary: oxford dictionary soft wear
Review: I'm looking for a soft wear Oxford dictionaty ,NOT translator.
with the list 500 000words and phrases.
Rating: 
Summary: Useless (adj) 1.serving no purpose
Review: The box boasts that this CD-ROM contains "240,000 words, phrases, and definitions". And since it also boasts that the content derives from the big-daddy 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, the lexophilic consumer imagines that he'll be getting all the current vocabulary, minus the juicy citations but crisply defined, for only 20 smackers. Hah! as Mrs. Krabappel would say. Oh, the 240,000 items are in there all right. Very up-to-date too. It has "HTML" for example. BUT IT ISN'T DEFINED!!! [Shouting intentional] That's right! It's just sitting there in the word list without the slightest indication of what the four letters stand for - let alone what Hypertext Markup Language *is*. If you go to look it up, the definition area will show "HTML" and lots of empty space. Pretty bloody useless, eh, Nigel? Once you open the software (rendering it unreturnable), the help file mumbles something about there being only 65,000 actual *entries*. With fading hopes that he hasn't flushed his[money]down the toilet, the consumer flips randomly through the word list to see what else they didn't manage to find room for. How about "hertz"? Oh, it will tantalize you with the information with the word derives from the 19th century German physicist H.R. Hertz. *But it doesn't define the word*! Excuse me, but what is the freaking point of knowing a word's derivation if I don't know what the hell it means? Or how about the entry for "tangram"? No definition there either, but the derivation is "Origin C19: of unknown origin". Great! But I guess I should be grateful! If I go to "cosmic", all it will tell me is that there are derivatives "cosmical" and "cosmically"! The Oxford University Press is disgraced by this unmitigated rip-off.
<< 1 >>
| 
