Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
OLD, but gOLD, 3 Dec 2004
By A Customer
A CD-ROM dictionary is to be rated, I think, in accordance with two main criteria: content and software usefulness. Regarding contents, a dictionary might be given an excellent rate, but its poor software might spoil its usefulness and damage user's work effectiveness. This is the case, in my opinion, with the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary version 2 (year 2002) - it has all those 500 000 entries which the Oxford Talking Dictionary (OTD) (OTD is based mostly on the SOED's predecessor - the 1994 release of The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary) does as well (and they are even improved), but its appearance and performance customizing opportunities are far poorer than those of OTD. In the SOED there is practically zero opportunity for the user to customize its appearance in order to adapt it to his/hers preferences and needs. One cannot change even the font size of entry's text which is definitely a great disadvantage in my (and in many others) shortsighted eyes. The OTD's screen appearance is the most useful one I have encountered mostly for its capability of OUTLINING - OTD's screen is split into three very clearly outlined fields so that the user could automatically, with only a quick glance, visually recognize the three very successfully distributed different areas of the full word reference, of the thesaurus and the quotations and of the alphabetically ordered "All Entries" pane. I find it very important that this pane occupies the right end of the OTD screen, because English speakers are accustomed to reading in left-to-right direction and when one is looking up a word his/her look falls not first on the "All entries" with all those words he/she is NOT looking for, but directly to the word reference, because the alphabetical list of words is on its right side - this is indeed the only such appearance decision I have ever seen which I strongly approve of (this is not the case with SOED unfortunately).
None of this is to be belittled when a user (especially a non-native English speaker such as myself) spends long hours in in-depth-familiarizing him-/herself with a certain word's history and typical usages. So this 1998 release might seem outdated to some, but I think right on the contrary - it has certain features and offers certain opportunities extinct in more "up-to-date" Oxford English dictionaries which make it far better and efficient than most of them.P. S. Oh, and I am running it under Windows XP with no problems whatsoever.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's just necessary, 16 Nov 2000
By A Customer
Are you studing English? Do you like reading? The problem with reading is that you never know how a new word should be pronounced... well, this can help!This programme works, and worths every penny you are going to spend. And then... does it ever happen to you? Sometimes the explanation of a word is more difficult than the word itself. No problem, just double-click on any word and you will find the explanation... in one second. At the end, right, you life is not gonna change for ...quid, but perhaps your English...
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent tool, runs on Linux using wine too, 11 May 2008
The Oxford Talking Dictionary is an excellent tool, providing extensive coverage of the meaning and usage of more than 100,000 items. The interface, as others have noted, is flexible, and provides powerful tools for finding the information that you are looking for.
One useful feature of the OTD is its ability to look up entries whose spelling is similar to that of a query not present in the OTD database. This comes in handy not only if the user misspells a lexical item, but also if they only know what it roughly 'sounds like'.
The OTD is, indeed, one of the very few Windows programmes that I still use. I mostly work on Linux, which is notoriously short on professionally made, native dictionary applications. The open source Wine project (now at version 1.0 rc 1) allows me to run the OTD at 'native' speeds, with all of the features present on the Windows platform.
Two tips for prospective users who would like to run the OTD on Linux: make sure that Wine detects your CD-ROM drive correctly, and copy all of the ttf fonts from the OTD folder to /Windows/fonts once the OTD has been installed.
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