Customer Reviews

The Essential English-Gaelic Dictionary: A Dictionary for Students and Learners of Scottish Gaelic

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This is an excellent dictionary. It has modern technical vocabulary not found in older dictionaries (You can indeed say "internet" in Gaelic) and is very easy to use. It has almost all of the vocabulary that you will need when doing an introductory course in Gaelic. It is small enough to be easy to search and large enough to have a great deal more detail and examples of usage than can be found in the pocket dictionaries. Its only real competition is the much larger dictionary produced by Colin Mark. Mark's dictionary has a much larger vocabulary coverage and many more examples of usage, but it is so large that it is difficult to find words and phrases in it. Watson's dictionary should be the front-line dictionary, with Mark's immense volume being used as heavy artillery to back up the front line.

I guess I assumed that this was a conventional bilingual dictionary (i.e. provides translations for both English and Gaelic words). It is, as a more careful shopper than myself might notice, called an English-Gaelic dictionary, and it is that only. Mia Culpa, but I bought it to help with translations from Gaelic into English for research purposes. It is, though, quite up to date, perhaps much more up to date than most readers of Gaelic so that you can send them running to a dictionary to figure out what you're talking about... though they'd have trouble figuring it out with this text.

This dictionary is relatively hard to follow. The words are listed by Gaelic terms which makes you have to almost go page by page to find the American word. If it was listed the other way around it would make it a lot more useful.