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, 2009, £25.05 (pbck and DVD); £35.05 (cased and DVD); £23.95 (pbck only).
ISBN: 978 1 4082 1533 3 (pbck and DVD); 978 1 4082 1532 6 (cased and DVD); 978 1 4082 0297 5 (pbck only). Harlow
I long put off reviewing this dictionary: it is a complex work. Not that it is particularly difficult to use - the use of colour headings, boxed asides and variant typefaces are well done and the whole work is well thought out. I prevaricated, partly because of the sheer bulk of the work - a heavy paperback of over 2,000 pages, and partly because in addition to the now customary DVD and online alternative formats there is a mobile phone download option. Two thousand pages of dictionary on your mobile phone! Are mobile phones replacing books? Will libraries be installing battery recharging points and top-up sales counters like some hotels? Maybe they have already. So what is it I am reviewing here: a reference book, a DVD, an online resource, or a ring tone? But the foreword by Randolph Quirk, a leading scholar in the esoteric world of English grammar, stirs me to action. If "Professor the Lord Quirk, FBA" recognizes the need for today's dictionaries "to be fully integrated with computers and mobile phones that are at least as much the modern learner's essential everyday equipment as pen and paper", then so must I. Pen and paper as well as books in retreat! Well, well, well!
First and foremost, this is a dictionary. Thus the word short has four entries representing four cases - as an adjective (with 24 meanings), an adverb (13 meanings), a noun (6) and as a verb (just the one - "to short", as in electricity). The word short is followed by short-age, short back and sides, short-bread, short-cake, short-change, and on to short-termism, short wave and short-y. All these lead terms are...