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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
A fresh approach, but nothing groundbreaking., 6 Sep 1999
By A Customer
I'm a lexicographer (working on bilingual dictionaries) and English is not my mother tongue. I got the Encarta World English Dictionary (Bloomsbury edition) from Amazon immediately after I got back from my summer holiday. In size and layout it resembles last year's New Oxford Dictionary of English; moreover, both claim they were written from scratch, so to speak, applying the latest lexicographical principles and ensuring coverage of world English, which the Encarta dictionary considers enough of a selling point to put in its title. I am very much in favour of dictionaries with illustrations, tables, diagrams, and notes in little frames. The NODE has the little frames but is not illustrated; Encarta is, like the American Heritage Dictionary (sorry, but there'll be some name-dropping in this review), though I find the latter's illustrations often more relevant. I believe an illustrated dictionary should illustrate as many as possible of those entries whose definitions can be enhanced by a picture. On the other hand, Encarta includes structural diagrams of chemical compounds, which would look nice and appropriate in Chambers Science and Technology Dictionary (though you wouldn't find them there). And somehow, I don't like captions which do not make clear which sense of a word they refer to, but then I don't think any other dictionary indulges my whim, either. The Encarta dictionary also differs from the NODE in that it uses quick definitions in bold capitals to guide through longer entries to the appropriate sense: these, where they are not useful as alternative definitions, tend to be slightly shortened versions of the definition that follows, which seems like a waste of space. In this respect, I prefer the definition labels (called signposts) introduced by Longman in their Dictionary of Contemporary English. The definitions themselves in Encarta are meaty without being convoluted, and the examples short and to the point. Encarta |
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