Random House was not at all in my list in the past. I was a fan of Oxford for a long time. A friend who is an elocutionist suggested me to take a look at the Random House Unabridged. I went to check the reviews in amazon and was surprised to see that only few reviews and many of them rating low. But I can not ignore my friend's request because of his language skills with a great vocabulary. So I went to the local store and checked it. I was amazed of the structure and sharp definitions. I looked it for few days then I replaced Oxford with this immediately and happily, does not mean RHUAD is bettern than OED, but I RHUAD provides more comfort to users.
This unabridged dictionary nearing 315,000 entries for $60-$70 comes with slightly cheap paper & binding as other dictionaries, because of the quality of all products, materials including human life have gone down considerably nowadays. All of the dictionaries available in the market now have gone outside the boundary of education to pure business. So consumers are required to bring their expectations down dramatically.
Construction:
Most of the people are under the assumption of an unabridged dictionary should contain more words, at least 300,000 to 500,000 or ALL the words in the language. I believe it is not true. It is unabridged only in its content not the list of words. For example, a publication's storage has 500 words and each one has definitions either in one line or 10 lines, the dictionary with that full storage data can very well be called "UNABRIDGED". If someone takes 300 words out of it, edit the definitions to shorter form, say 10 lines to 3 lines and that dictionary is "ABRIDGED". It is difficult to count words from such big books. I took an average 'head word' count of at least 10 individual pages and multiply by the number of dictionary pages. It comes close to "170,000 - 172,000" head words. Many of them have more than one entry in definitions. So, I believe it has around "315,000" entries as the message printed on top of the book. There is another sentence in the amazon description says "Over 750,000 example phrases and sentences to show how words are used in context". It is hard to believe that or I don't know what parameters should be used to calculate that or I actually do not know what it means. So I assume that it is 75,000 which is an acceptable range.
Content:
It does not have so called "NEW" words, but no one is introducing 100 words per month on this language and expecting dictionaries having all words till yesterday. It surely has most of the words used till 1999 (as most of the people worrying that this is the same version as 1999 ) and that will be enough for 99% of the people in this world throughout their life to get proficiency in English. In my point of view, I loose nothing in this transaction, because all the new words found lately, one way or other I already knew it. So I don't need it in printing. I would want to check the words that I don't know, which I have plenty in this book.
In the usage notes and example sentences, it can not compete with other brands, like OALD and Longman. Because it is unabridged and not possible to put so many usage notes. But it has examples on important words.
It is not readily available for students, as it is so big and require very gentle handling if you want to have it for a long time without damage. You can not check your 20 SAT words in 2 mins. If you are student, the 'college' version of Random House is a very good choice, there is a portable 'mass market paberback' also availble.
In comparing contents, every dictionary is using almost same meaning. You can not find a entirely different meaning in two different brands of dictionaries. Same is here. It is common as the language standards. But there is a HUGE advantage in this dictionary, it lists out the most common definition used in United States first and the definitions are very SHARP and CLEAR. Most of the places it does not use the 'routing' method used by some of the populor brands in market by routing to another word to another word if they sound similar. For example a word 'dissonance' is listed in RH paperback as "1. inharmonious sound; discord. 2. lack of harmony or agreement." where as it is listed in MW paperback as just "DISCORD".
It also has another advantage, on pronunciation. The keys are SO simple that you can get the meaning in a few seconds by reading it. You don't need any special audio sound to do that. While it is difficult in Oxford brands for general users as it uses IPA system.
To improve your vocabulary with right definitions, clear pronunciation, this is the best available dictionary for a cheaper price.
The electronic version has identical content. It is simple, small. GUI looked to be built when windows 3.0 was released. But it WORKS. If you are happy to type or copy and paste words to get meaning, this can solve your problems. It additionally has a drag and drop option which I found very helpful.
Finally...
There is no one best dictionary, even with Oxford, people have problems. Oxford Advanced Learners is way better than OED on usage notes, but OED is better than OALD in number of words. AHD is better than MW on etymology, but MW is better than all other dictionaries on being prescriptive rather than descriptive. RH is better than Oxford on definitions focused mainly United States region sharply and the story goes on and on for ever. We are not here to analyze and predict who is going to win the race as there is no such thing exists. Our mission is to just find the one that can help us when we need to find a meaning of a word. RHUAD can fulfil your needs.
This can also be a wonderful dictionary for you.
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There is a newer edition of this item:
Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary with CD-ROM
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$50.01
(90)
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
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