Customer Reviews

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary: BOOKMAN(R) (Electronic desktop model)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Webster Collegiate Dictionary is much more than a dictionary -- it's almost a small encyclopedia. And with Franklin's wonderful search capabilities you can use it quickly and unintrusively while reading, writing or even speaking. Here are some of the advantages of this great product:

- Quick: If you need to look up many words, face it: You're NOT going to start paging through a dictionary... Why guess at the meaning of words when you can get a quick and accurate definition in no time?

- Flexible: If you're not sure how to spell a word, you can do one of two things: Spell it the way it sounds, and let the unit find all the words that sound the same; Or you can use the "wildcard search" to search for words that satisfy a given pattern.

- Informative: This is not just a dictionary, it's a thesaurus as well. Get synonyms and antonyms as well. The Collegiate dictionary will also give you phonetic and linguistic information on the word. The Collegiate comes with tables too: Tables of countries and information on them, the periodic table with full information, the Jewish calendar, etc. Go over the list of tables once, just so that you know what's available, because it would be a pity to have all this infomation and not know of it -- I found it very useful.

- A great user interface: The search is great. The unit's nice to use. If you turn it off and then on, it still remembers what's on the screen so you can turn it off safely without fear of losing anything. If you're within an entry and you click <enter> it will let you navigate between the words, select one and search it too! -- So if you don't understand the explanation, just click away until you do!

- Amusement: Use it to solve crossword puzzles! Just type in the letters you know, and place a ? for each letter you don't know. Franklin will show you all the possibilities! There are some games built in, but I prefer using it to solve crossword puzzles, or even better -- compose some!

- Extensible: This unit has room for two BOOKMAN cards. Add an encyclopedia or French or German or Spanish - English dictionaries, add the Bible in one of several available translations. And you can add much more. But if you are really adventurous, get the BOOKMAN creator kit from Franklin -- it's really inexpensive -- and DOWNLOAD ANY INFORMATION YOU LIKE -- create your own cards, inexpensively, and pop'em in and out whenever you need additional information. You could download an entire novel only such a card and be able to read it anywhere.

- Very well built: Sturdy -- I dropped mine a zillion times. The batteries last forever. You can plug in an ordinary earphone so you can listen to pronounciation without disturbing others (great for the library or when in class).

The most important thing is: Make sure to get the Webster Collegiate Dictionary and not some other Webster by mistake. The Collegiate is the best.

If you don't like the size and you're willing to give up the pronounciation, then get the pocket version -- it's just as good other than the pronounciation and the fact that it takes only one extra BOOKMAN card.

The ONLY drawback I can think of, regarding this unit, is that I would have REALLY liked it to have included a pocket calculator. It seems to have all the key markings for one, so someone must have had the idea of adding one, but the fact is that no such calculator exists -- not even as a BOOKMAN add-on. Pity.