![]() I hope I never finish it - that there will always be something new to discover about our fabulous (though often painfully flawed) English language. This review is a little different than most of those I've written because I haven't actually read the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary all the way through, and yet this is not a negative tirade on how ridiculously awful the first few pages were (see Code of the Mountain Man, X-Rated Bloodsuckers, and When One Man Dies for examples of those). At the price Amazon offers it's a steal! I unreservedly recommend the SOED to all aficianados of the English language. My purchase of the SOED is a dream come true. It traces development, spelling and usage of words over, in many cases, several centuries, quoting from works of well-known English writers. (It has a kewl audio pronunciation feature accessed using an icon after the word which avoids deciphering the 'hieroglyphs' in the print edition, avoiding the need to 'learn a second language'!) I purchased the Deluxe Edition with CD-ROM that uploads to the computer enabling subsequent usage without the disc in the drive. The SOED is only one step down and more than adequately meets my needs. Even using the magnifier supplied, I was going blind!) In Canada, the OED CD-ROM alone lists at CDN $500., more than I could justify. (I have the Compact OED in which all 16,000 pages appear 4-up on 4,000 pages. The full OED runs to ~16,000 pages in ~20 volumes which is overkill for all but professional philologists. I was a tech writer and editor with an intense, lifelong interest in the language, its usage, mechanics and subtle nuances that shorter works are unable to provide. Not perfect, no, but well worth the price. If you're a dictionary junkie like me, you'll want to get this one. This improves performance immensely, plus frees your CD drive for something else Microsoft Bookshelf 98 in my case. I also discovered a Very Cool Thing you can do, which is to copy the CD subdirectories to your hard disk - if you have the room - and access the app without needing the compact disc. Also, the screen presentation looks pretty good, so there's that. I'm glad to have this material readily to hand, so I can easily live with Oxford University Press's obvious lack of skill in the interface department. Grabbing single blocks of text is easy however. Also, no line breaks are preserved when you paste into a text editor, so plan on lots of reformatting if this is something you want to do often. Also, while I'm picking nits, there is no option to Select All (pretty standard with Win95 apps these days), so you have to mouse select the whole page if that's what you want. More irritating is not having better access to the quotation sources and authors. The Windows menu does not include an option to tile the screen (just cascade), plus the app doesn't remember window positions. btw, if there are possible other forms of the word you've selected this way, a menu pops up to let you choose. I would have preferred a right-button mouse menu, but I'm glad to have the capability however it's implemented. ![]() If you double-click any word (to highlight it), then mouse on the open-book icon, the entry for that word will be called into the display window. The previous review complained that headwords had to be entered manually, and I thought so too for about half an hour of playing with the none-too-intuitive interface.
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