Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
More than just a dictionary, 20 Jul 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
This is a moderately hefty one-volume English dictionary, roughly comparable in size and price to the Oxford Concise Dictionary. However, it differs in an important respect because this is actually more than just a list of word meanings and pronunciations including, for example, many proper names - notably people and places. In this respect it must be highly selective to remain within a manageable single volume, so I find that it includes my present home town (High Wycombe) but omits my previous home town (Lutterworth), presumably because it falls below some population threshold. It includes a fair selection of major overseas cities - for example I found the capital of Slovenia (Ljubljana) and the second city (Maribor) but not the country's major port (Koper). On a sample of cricketers, Andrew Flintoff gets a mention but Michael Vaughan does not.
The availability of an online version provides extra value in an excellent package which is up-to-date with many new words and usages. Recommended as a good general purpose-reference for the home and study.
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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Whole New Meaning!, 3 Jul 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
Clocking in at almost 2000 pages the new Collins Concise English Dictionary brings a whole new meaning to the word concise. As the foreward says, the best dictionaries are snapshots of the language they define and fascinating neologisms abound in this volume.
Take, for example, "goat", which is defined as a senior policy advisor to Gordon Brown's government. It is an acronym of the Brown expression, "government of all the talents." Perhaps an Ideas Hamster works in the Cabinet Office too because this defines a person employed as a source of new ideas.
Then there is "tag hag" - a woman with an excessive interest in designer clothes, "nonebrity" - a minor celebrity and "chuppy" a wealthy, young professional living in China.
The dictionary has features not usually found in concise works such as biographical and geographical entries. Thus, Johnny Cash shares page 263 with Casimir IV, a Lithuanian Grand Duke and Frank Sinatra appears on page 1550 with Sir James Young Simpson who pioneered the use of chloroform as an anaesthetic.
Whilst browsing the S section I learned that "Slim" is the East African name for AIDS, derived from its wasting effect. In passing, "fart comes from the Sanskrit "pardate" - he breaks wind, and Polycarp which sounds scientific or technical is actually Saint Polycarp, a Christian martyr.
The geographical entries are comprehensive: from Bognor Regis to Basra, Helsinki to Hong Xiu Quan and Passamaquoddy Bay to the Pribilof Islands vis Preston, Lancashire.
At £20, this dictionary represents fantastic value. Not just as a work of reference but as a treasure trove of information into which you can dip and browse and be entertained for hours.
Where, after all, would you learn that "crap" derives from the Dutch "crappen" to break off(!) and that a berk is a stupid fellow and a contraction of Berkeley Hunt, which, of course, is rhyming slang!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fine dictionary, 18 Aug 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
Having lasted me more than half my life, seen me through High School, two university degrees, authorship of two books and hundreds of thousands of words of journalism, my crumbling copy of the Oxford English Dictionary was looking rather jaded, not to mention out-of-date. Collins Concise Dictionary is a more than decent update. I like the clarity that comes from reading from clear white pages, the words listed in blue print; I like the Encylopaedic entries (look up any town or city and it will give you basic details; ditto contemporary and historical figures). One thing it could have expanded upon was word origins - but that is a minor quibble that can be attributed to its size more than any editorial omission. What more can I say? It's a good dictionary and will hopefully last me as long as its predecessor.
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