Customer Reviews

Cassell's French Dictionary: French-English, English-French

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I am always amazed that the Cassell's French dictionary is still around. It is full of obsolete words and meanings in both French and English, gives sketchy definitions, and is generally hard to use. The Collins-Robert College (0062752537) is infinitely better in every way, and costs the same.

Buried on the copyright page is the most fascinating fact in this book: that a major publishing house has the gall to keep the words "entirely new" on the dust-jacket of a dictionary it hasn't revised in twenty-seven years.

It's so old that the entry for the word "microwave" doesn't mention ovens. This is a fine dictionary as far as it goes. Unfortunately, as far as it goes is the Carter administration.

If you're a professional translator who needs a shelf full of lexicons, it's a useful volume. But if you're only going to get one French-English / English-French dictionary, this emphatically should *not* be it.

This book is a good dictionary to get an idea of meanings of words, but doesn't give clear definitions, and needs to be revised severely. Until they come out with a new edition or re-do this one, I would NOT recommend it.

I disagree with the previous reviews. A bilingual dictionary is rarely of use to a writer, and is of use to a reader only as a complement to a pair of good single-language dictionaries. Although it may fail as a tourist's companion, the Cassell's serves my purposes as a reader well. The many dated idioms/definitions are rarely archaic, and don't detract from the clarity and completeness of the text; what's more, the understanding of a word requires some knowledge of its history. "All the world over," by the way, is translated "dans le monde entier."

The edition I have of this particular Cassell's dictionary is even older than the outdated one for sale here; it was originally my father's book, and it was old even when he was using it in college, because the book (which is now missing its spine and is falling apart) was published in 1910, mentioning in the forward that it's been updated to include words relating to "new" innovations such as bicycling, motoring, and aviation. At least the more modern version here has words such as television and radio, even if it doesn't include words such as microwave and internet. It's a fine volume if you're just interested in deciphering the untranslated French passages in old books from the era when everyone spoke French as a second language, or if you're just studying the language casually, but if you're a serious student of the language you'll want a much more modern dictionary, which contains words which have been coined or ones relating to new inventions and innovations which have come along since the Seventies. (Once while looking through my copy's pages, I saw somewhere "to Jew someone down," as well as other phrases and words which are now highly outdated and just plain racist and offensive.) Still, even for being as old as it is, whichever edition you're using, it gets the job done for basic translations, and my edition does have some very nice appendices, such as one giving the French and English names of various geographical features and nations (some of which no longer exist, like Prussia and Upper Volta) and another giving a long list of various names in their English and French equivalents, most of them being from mythology, antiquity, literature, and times before the modern era.

This dictionary contains a plethora of easily found phrases, and often have I vainly searched for a word, such as "calmande," for example, and have found in in Cassell's. It is not the most modern of dictionaries, and as a previous reviewer said, for more modern translation, a dictionary such as Collins-Robert is useful. But for reading most French literary works, Cassell's is quite sufficient and often extremely useful.

I have been studying French for over 40 years (and teaching French for over 20 years), including academics at the University of Nice, and I can tell you without any hesitation that Cassell's is one of the most revered dictionaries (and an often required supplement) in many French classes in America, and with good reason.

Cassell's has been revered for years because of its complex, highly detailed and most thorough English-French/French-English dictionary for Anglo/Francophone students and professors for decades, at least in the world of academia. I do admit that it does need SOME updating, but otherwise it is one of the most thorough dictionaries on the market.

By reading several of these posts, I can see why beginners of the French language are quite frustrated with it. It often contains more complex structures and fails to give actual "sentence examples", which by my standard is its rightful place. If you want a "grammatical dictionary", Cassell's "DICTIONARY" is NOT the book you want. You may want to consider purchasing, "Cassell's Contemporary French Handbook of Grammar, Current Usage and Word Power" as a supplement.

Although Cassell's is a dictionary most often used in higher levels of French academic study, it can be easily used by the beginner French student, if the student understands that this is a DICTIONARY. It does contain some archaic entries that MAY be outdated in some contexts (some words are completely outdated), but this is WHY it is so exceptional to the academic linguist who also wants a more thorough understanding of the language and origins and/or progressions of meanings. It also notes word origins of other languages, which is not something you can find every day.

NOTE: (I just wrote to the Academie Francoise to request their opinion of the dictionary. As soon as I receive a response from them, I will note it in the "Comments" section below, for future reference.)

As a French student, and also as a high school teacher of French, I HIGHLY recommend this dictionary if you want to thoroughly understand word usage, as you can often cross-check entries and synonyms within each entry for better clarification of meanings (including meanings that are more cultural than linguistic). This is dictionary is invaluable to the serious French academic.

Ce dictionnaire est de mauvaise qualité. Trop souvent, les definitions sont obsoletes, le vocabulaire caduc. Le livre semble tout droit sorti du XIXeme siecle, sans aucune réactualisation pendant le XXeme (la rentabilité du produit doit être exemplaire, un case study pour les business schools). Exemple de traduction: all the world over = par toute la terre...

A eviter absolument