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108 of 111 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The hitchhiker's guide to the glossary, 30 Aug 2004
Electronic dictionaries have been slow to catch on in the UK, but this model may change that. I guess most children have an aversion to dictionaries full-stop. I remember at school finding it so tedious to look up words in the index, or in a dictionary, particularly when you weren't confident about the spelling. The exercise became even more labrious if the explanation of the word contained further words you didn't understand.Electronic dictionaries are potentially offputting because you have to key the word in -- tedious if you're also using a computer WP package which means you'll have to key the word in twice. But wait ... if you don't get the spelling correct, this machine suggests similar-looking words. And if there's any word you don't understand in the explanation of a word, you simply move the cursor to that word and jump to its explanation. Hopping around from word to word is much easier with the Sharp than with a hardcopy dictionary. The Sharp also contains a good thesaurus and ... uniquely ... a fine book of quotations, from the Oxford University Press. I have the hardcopy versions of the Oxford Dictionary of English and the Oxford Book of Quotations, and I know from the size and weight of them that I would not want to lug them around. Yet this device weighs little more than a scientific calculator. The reason I refer in the title to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is that, unexpectedly, the Oxford Dictionary of English contains a reasonable encyclopaedia. This is not sufficiently extensive to have the people at Britannica worried, but if I key in, for example, RICHARD and hit the ENTER key, I get 60-word write-ups of each of the three King Richards of England. It is a minor marvel. And the great thing is that there is no boot-up time: you switch it on and, as fast as a calculator, it's ready for input. The only down-side is that, though this may look like many of Sharp's organisers, you cannot store any of your own text or data on the device. But that's probably for the best -- I wouldn't want to become too dependent on the thing!
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