Customer Reviews

Diccionario de uso del Espanol (2 Volumes) (Spanish Edition)

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Es una hazaña lexicográfica, pues permite encontrar palabras que uno no sabe que existen. Se puede navegar en él casi como en el ciberespacio. Permite además crear neologismos perfectamente legítimos. Aporta gran cantidad de información gramatical con ejemplos tomados siempre de la lengua viva, así como formas de construcción y pautas de pronunciación para extranjeros. Incluye revisiones críticas de los criterios de la Real Academia. No es perfecto -sin embargo-, por sus omisiones, pero es más consistente, más rico y más confiable que el de la Real Academia. Si usted trabaja con palabras, "this is a must".

I knew it would be a good dictionary, but not this good. Given that no dictionary can purport to be complete, this one surely tries. It is amazing how comprehensive it is and yet so easy to understand. I was blown away with the very first entry:

"a
1 f. Primera letra del alfabeto. Se pronuncia con los labios muy abiertos, y los dientes separados aproximadamente 1 cm; la lengua, con el dorso elevado hacia la línea de separación entre el paladar duro y el velo del paladar, y rozando con la punta los dientes inferiores, mientras los bordes siguen los molares inferiores. En la escala de altura, la «a» ocupa el lugar medio, después de la «i» y la «e» y antes de la «o» y la «u». Su nombre es su propio sonido. Letra griega correspondiente, «alfa»."

It follows this with three other "a" entries, a total of 31 definitions with examples, a few colloquial expressions and a usage notes section.

This is my very first CD ROM dictionary, so I don't know if its features are standard or not. It has a very quick word search engine that works very much like the help feature in many programs. As you would expect it lists entries in alphabetical order, but curiously enough, by last letter as well. It has a deep grammar section, cross-referencing capabilities and also suggestions if a word search comes up empty. Though I've yet to incorporate it in my word processor, I've read it can be accessed this way.

Now about the price. I purchased the 2nd edition online and paid considerably less (...) by having it shipped directly from Spain. This is a wonderful dictionary. I highly recommend it.

Si se pudiera hablar de un diccionario de diccionarios de la lengua espanola, ese es precisamente el de Maria Moliner, quien dedico su vida a la realizacion de una obra capital de referencia, no solo para los hispanoparlantes, sino tambien para todos aquellos que se acerquen a la lengua de Cervantes y Quevedo. Una adquisicion indispensable para toda biblioteca.

Excellent reference for translators and language professionals. Indispensable to every serious student of the Spanish language. Yes, it's very expensive, but well worth it.

This dictionary has served a dual purpose in the library collection here:

1) provide coverage of the modern standard Spanish language, reasonably close to comprehensive, for the native speaker of that language, and

2) provide the same sort of coverage for the non-native speaker who already has a reasonable command of Castellano.

These are different tasks, but the two-volume Moliner does both. I rarely encounter a word which is not in this book; there is fairly good coverage of the language back to the Golden Age and Moliner does an acceptable job with regionalisms as well. The definitions are easy to understand for foreigners as well as native Hispanohablantes, with excellent see-references and enlightening examples. Grammatical and phonological information is impressive: I did not know, for instance, that Andalusians sometimes combine "Ustedes" pronoun which the "vosotros" verb form (not the case in America), nor had I noticed that the singular "Usted" will lose its accent and become proclitic on a following word beginning with a vowel (this is a bit clearer in the entry on "Usted"). Appendices include a list of Graeco-Latin scientific names with their equivalent in "buen Romance" and a chapter "Desarrollos gramaticales", an extensive commentary on questions of Spanish grammar (not a grammar per se).

Aside from this work, we use the recent Oxford Spanish-English/English-Spanish Dictionary (3rd ed. 2003). This is fine within its limits, and the work is among the best Spanish-English dictionaries currently available, but the coverage is just not quite adequate to the current situation in the United States, where Spanish has assumed a national importance quite beyond that of any non-English language since independence from Britain, other than possibly German.