Merriam-Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary, Revised Edition [Paperback]

Merriam-Webster (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 21, 2002 | ISBN-10: 1401879683 | ISBN-13: 978-1401879686 | Edition: Revised

Merriam-Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary, Revised Edition is an invaluable resource for health care professionals with over 59,000 entries covering today's most widely used health-care terms, abbreviations, medication names, and biographies of medical pioneers. Unlike unwieldy medical encyclopedias, MW Medical Desk Dictionary, 2E is compact, portable, and affordable making it perfect for everyone from allied health students to medical professionals to consumers without a medical background who want a desktop reference without investing a lot of money.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Medical lingo is nearly a language in its own right, so for students of medicine or amateurs who'd like to understand their doctors' conversations, a dictionary of medical terms is a necessity. With a section on medical prefixes and suffixes, more than 2,000 new entries added since 1986, and thousands of illustrations, the recent version is 112 pages longer and a lot easier on the eyes. There's information on AIDS, biochemistry, psychiatry, and geriatric medicine, concise definitions for procedures, tests, and medications, plus all the terms and topics that hit the headlines or appear in your physical report. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

At first glance, one may wonder why yet another medical dictionary is needed when there are such classics as Black's Medical Dictionary, Blakiston's Gould Medical Dictionary, and Stedman's Medical Dictionary. Merriam Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary, an update of the 1986 edition published as Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary, is written for laypeople. Its format and size remain unchanged. According to the publisher, there are more than 5,000 new words, and 6,000 definitions have been revised. Definitions for such terms as AIDS have been extensively revised to reflect the Center for Disease Control's new criteria. As in the previous one, some 1,000 biographies of individuals whose names are an integral part of the medical literature are included.

The publisher claims that this volume "combines a medical wordlist (including British terms and spelling variants) selected and defined on the basis of citational evidence." Since there are several million medically relevant citations, a critical review of those included in this dictionary was made. Also, every word used in the defining vocabulary had to be in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. The result is a usable and understandable dictionary that includes pronunciation, capitalization, division, usage, and variants. There are no illustrations. The definitions are concise and technical but still understandable by the educated layperson.

This dictionary will not replace the standard medical dictionaries in medical libraries but is the reasonably priced medical dictionary of choice for school and public libraries. It would be especially useful for secretaries and nonmedical users. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 917 pages
• Publisher: Delmar Cengage Learning; Revised edition (May 21, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1401879683
• ISBN-13: 978-1401879686
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #339,506 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Transcriptionist's Friend!, September 6, 2002

By 

Donald S. Meador "imthman" (Novo Hamburgo, Brazil) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Merriam-Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary with CD-ROM (Hardcover)

My wife just returned to doing medical transcription work from home. We needed a medical dictionary for the words she was not familiar with. We opted for Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary. We are very pleased with this medical dictionary, primarily because it is bundled with the CD-ROM.

The dictionary itself contains 57,000 medical terms with understandable definitions. The definitions are more limited than in Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary. For example, the MW definition of sclerosis includes reference to one other disease (multiple sclerosis). Dorland's definition of sclerosis includes references to about 40 varieties of sclerosis (including brief explanations of each). Therefore, the MW medical dictionary is not the most exhaustive on the market. It certainly would not do for a Doctor, but it is quite sufficient for a home dictionary. The MW medical dictionary is not illustrated, nor does it include abbreviations for the terms defined.

We were very glad to find the MW bundled with the CD-ROM. The CD version of the dictionary includes a search engine. So, when doing transcription, the search engine can be used on the dictionary without having to pull out a book and sift through 57,000 definitions. This is a great bonus. The CD also includes abbreviations for the medical terms. They even included a feature allowing you to hear the word pronounced correctly. I only found one drawback to the search engine. When looking at the list of terms you have to click on a term to see the definition. Sometimes two words are spelled similarly and sound nearly the same. If the word you clicked on is not the word you need, you have to clear the search and start over - there is no way to return to the list of words from your original query. At least, we have not found a way to do so.

Overall, the Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary has met our needs. We are pleased with the purchase.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Kindle Review, February 26, 2010

By 

Amanda "DarkSiren929" (VA, USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Merriam-Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary (Kindle Edition)

This Medical dictionary has been a life-saver for me and my college classes towards my major. I love this purchase and I will definitely be using it for many more years to come.

14 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not my favorite medical dictionary/manual., June 12, 2000

By 

K. L Sadler "Dr. Karen L. Sadler" (Freedom, Pa. USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Merriam-Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary (Merriam Websters Medical Desk Dictionary, 1st ed) (Hardcover)

This was the first medical dictionary I got while in medical school. Since I was in there for Neuroscience and not to get an MD. perhaps my area of speciality was too limited for those who would usually use this dictionary. It was extremely frustrating to look up things such as encephalocele and find either no information or very little information. I decided that as a dictionary of medical terminology, books such as this cannot be limited to the concise words given in other dictionaries. There were too many times I was reading or writing medical papers in which I had to put this particular version down and look up the information I needed either at school or on the Internet. When you are in a hurry, you don't have time to do either of those things and prefer to have something you can just flip open alphabetically and get the answer you were looking for. I realize someone put a lot of work into this, but it just isn't enough and I have since gotten another dictionary to which I regularly refer. It isn't this one. Karen Sadler Science Education, University of Pittsburgh