Customer Reviews

Elsevier's Dictionary of Abbreviations, Acronyms, Synonyms and Symbols used in Medicine: Second, Enlarged Edition
In English with ... of Abbreviations, Acronyms, Synonyms)

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You would think that at $200 this is some kind of spectacular abbreviations dictionary. Not so! While it is quite good and was clearly compiled carefully - more so than many of the other similar dictionaries - I cannot understand what the publisher was thinking to price it at at least $150 more than any other similar reference. It has an enormous number of entries and is pretty accurate in terms of the correct formatting of abbreviations and symbols. One thing I found peculiar is that repeatedly, the author forgets that it is an abbreviatins dictionary and suddenly includes long lists of the meanings of words, like a regular word dictionary. For example, for the word "phobia" -- nothing to do with the abbreviation for phobia -- there are 3 single-spaced, double-columned pages of different kinds of phobias and what they mean. Also, for abbreviations that have multiple definitions, the author uses such strange and complicated punctuation that it is hard to understand where one definition ends and the next begins. On the whole, this is a good dictionary but there are others that are just as good for $170 less