Customer Reviews

Oxford American College Dictionary

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This 2002 book is an abridgement of the excellent New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD, published 2001), with a price in line with other college dictionaries. Unfortunately, there seem to be a few problem areas.

The first thing that will strike many college students and graduates is the almost complete absence of etymologies. A few of the more interesting ones are highlighted with the heading WORD HISTORY; for example, this is one of very few sources that make clear why the Dutch for "the cage" appears in English as DECOY. A few other etymologies appear with the heading ORIGIN. For the most part, you won't find any. It would seem that such information would add a lot to many entries, such as UBUNTU, TRIFFID, GROK, TOHUBOHU, and thousands more. One consequence is that the usage note for ESKIMO refers to a deleted etymology. Granted, the etymologies in most competitors have a lot of fluff; they'll show two of numerous older spellings of "dog" before implying that the trail grows cold in Old English; a simple "<OE" or "OE<?"should be enough. The datings that appear in a few competitors and some other Oxford dictionaries would be a fine addition.

In a brief survey of one-word lowercase entries from LI to LIEDER in this and three comparable (college) dictionaries, it appears that coverage in this dictionary is nearly as good. It is, however, the only one to omit LIAISE, LIBELANT, LIBELEE, LICENSURE, and an adjectival form for LIBATION (but the competitors disagree, two showing LIBATIONARY, one LIBATIONAL). This dictionary relegates LIBERALISM to a run-on, a word for which the competition had relatively long entries; the difference is partly offset by a longer entry for LIBERAL. But it was the only one not to relegate LIBERTARIANISM to a run-on. It has only run-ons for LIBERATION, LICHENOLOGY, and LIBRETTIST (the precise relation between a librettist and a libretto is not one of the senses given elsewhere for the suffix -IST). Two competitors explain the missing LIDLESS, a poetic form that may well still be met in colleges. It is the only one to list LICENSED, a form unlikely to be sought. Elsewhere, it is not hard to find entries that all the competitors omit; WAQF and CINQ will intrigue Scrabblers.

More than a dozen pages are blank. This is certainly a surprise, since most publishers allot their lexicographers however many pages can be printed affordably for the intended sales price, and they scramble to squash the available material into what seems to be too small a space. Larger Oxford dictionaries would provide plenty of material for filling these pages up.

No doubt Roger Staubach is pleased to have an entry, and would be even more so if his name were spelled correctly. It's unclear whether users would expect to find anything about him in a dictionary, but this one tries to include a lot of currently famous sports and entertainment personalities, and users might enjoy this feature. Cal Ripken makes an appearance too, but since the entry hasn't been updated, his 2001 retirement is unnoted. The space devoted to Perry, a tennis star from the thirties, might have been better devoted to Commodore Perry in a college dictionary, and there are many similar examples.

Unnecessarily in my opinion, an illustration for skyscraper has been edited to remove the World Trade Center. There are quite a number of illustrations, many adding little besides a break in what some readers might consider monotonous text. Whoever drew the picture for hyperbola has little appreciation for asymptotes. Every country comes with a large map, showing very few cities other than capitals, and mostly useless. The result is that the Northern Mariana Islands are shown with greater detail than in the National Geographic Atlas, while most of the largest U.S. cities appear on no map whatever. It's unclear that dictionary users expect maps, and those that do will probably look elsewhere.

Inevitably a new work has slipups here and there, of them possibly attributable to the abridgement. The entry for the noun SHANKS' MARE reads "used to walking"; you need the complete entry from NOAD to make any sense of the definition, which in itself is more of an explanation than something that can take the place of a noun. The symbol for SECOND didn't survive intact. The entries for GOODNESS and SAKE disagree on the punctuation of "for goodness' sake". Only the illustrative citation for Spartan hints that its metaphoric usage is now usually uncapitalized. And the spelling Stonehendge appears. At times one feels that one is the first human to be reading certain entries in their current form. Information for REIS, BO, SH, ADELGID, etc., is present, but not anywhere you are likely to look. On the other hand, "Sly" is cross-referenced to Stallone.

Kudos to Oxford for its sensible treatment of the spelling or usage of such entries as miniscule, flout/flaunt, plaintext, back seat, hopefully, disinterested, under way, supercede, they, and dozens more. Hopefully a future edition will have something to say against the spelling KI for the word pronounced CHI and now usually spelled QI. And hopefully we won't have to wait long for the Second Edition of this dictionary, a more patient and careful abridgement of NOAD. Except for price and portability, nearly all the pluses of this work are found in NOAD, while most of the minuses mentioned above are not in NOAD. For now, if you can afford only a college dictionary, I would have to recommend one of the others.

What I want in a (portable) dictionary is one that will have the words I look up. Since I have a pretty good vocabulary already, I tend to look up only words that are not in common usage. So, I want something to stick in a backpack, or have sitting on the end table next to me while I'm reading. Since I can't carry all 19 volumes of the OED around with me, and because I don't always have a computer handy, this is the dictionary I've selected. I don't often need etymology information, but I do want to know the meaning of words like orrery, exurb, or prandial before I read on. This is a good, all-around portable dictionary for all but a few who won't be satisfied with anything that doesn't take up six feet of shelf space.

I had been thinking about getting a new dictionary for my writing desk. I had a Websters and an American Heritage, which I thought pretty useful (despite their both being rather old editions), but I remembered using Oxford's huge multi-mammoth volume dictionary in high school (back when mammoths still roamed) and I liked the format and information presented by Oxford.

I settled on this dictionary (which I actually got on sale, which always makes buying something a little better) because I found that this edition consistently contained definitions for words I was running across while reading books written or translated in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. It seemed like the best affordable one volume dictionary for readers of history, literature and biography written during the above mentioned time period.

Surely, I've developed a strong bias for Oxford's output. See my review of the 1971 Compact Dictionary too. That said, I still can confidently recommend this dictionary as the single one to keep on the desk at work or home as well as at university. If the word is not in this dictionary, one probably needs to resort to a much larger, more comprehensive (and expensive) dictionary than the sort normally kept for use on the typical writing desk.

The word simp is found on page 1552, right inbetween USIA and Uskudar. What's up with that? This is a fairly blantant error that makes me suspect. I'll stick to Websters.

If you need a dictionary for your son or daughter, this is it!