Microsoft® Encarta® College Dictionary
   Anne H. Soukhanov, Editor
  2001 Bloomsbury Pub/St. Martin's Press
    ISBN: 0312280874


The English Language is growing, accelerated by the Internet, e-commerce & international business. Each day students, teachers, business people & consumers around the world are confronted with new words & terms.

The need for an up-to-date guide to this dynamic language has never been greater. The first entirely new college dictionary to be published in three decades, the Microsoft® Encarta® College Dictionary is compiled from a revolutionary computer database of global English.

This is The First Dictionary for the Internet Age & is a unique guide to using the Internet as a research resource. It has an easy-to-use “quick reference” system; more than 320,000 entries & definitions & contains the preeminent coverage of high-technology words.

That being said, what on earth does the word ENCARTA® mean? For starters it's not listed between encapsulate & encase, then again neither is Microsoft snuggled in between microseism & microsome. It must be a made up word, a title. I know it has its own website: www.encarta.msn.com. There is even a CD of it(Hint! Hint!)

My beloved starting laughing when he saw me dive right in. What a clear & topical word bible. They even give samples of some of the howlers students have written!

The text - for these aging eyes, is a blessing!

U.S. General Editor, Anne H. Soukhanov in her Foreword introduces this hefty volume with panache, perhaps in her pantdress & shoes with platform soles thinking about plastic money & listening to a pibroch with her picky pichiciego beside her in her pickup truck. All words you will find herein.

Revolutionary it may be, occasionally it is bland. The feminist in me sees a preponderance of contributors of the male gender in the fields of literature, science & the arts. I suppose there still are more male students than female ones attending English-speaking colleges. Notice the gender of the top guns handling this tome.

Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Kathy Rooney writes the Introduction to the First Edition in which she highlights the several unique aspects of this teaching dictionary. How listings for most frequently misspelled words look; what the SPELLCHECK alerts will tell you; what the CORRECT USAGE sections mean; how the QUICK FACTS can add to your search as well as a marvelous tool called LITERARY LINK which will give you a mini-precis of what the book is about.

Now there's a little item which I found rather tantalizing! Beside certain words is the legend: (taboo offensive). I'll leave you to search them out - just remember this is a dictionary of modern words! Have fun & do spell them correctly if you're going to use them! Nothing more silly than a misspelled expletive!

They've given Elvis Presley, Carmen Miranda, John Wayne, The Beatles, Eudora Welty, Desmond Tutu, Seiji Ozawa, Wallace Stevens, Marie Stopes, Anwar al-Sadat, Dame Agatha Christie, Malcom X, Doris Lessing, Langston Hughes, Amy Johnson, Neil Armstrong, Harriet Tubman(among many) photo entries as well as all the usual suspects from our glorious past, you know them all: Copernicus, Winston Churchill, Pocahontas, Woodrow Wilson, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Edward Douglass White, Mary Wollstonecraft, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Robert E. Lee & Vladimir Ilyich Lenin et al.

So many words & so little space to write about them: downsize, encode, IPL, mini-skirt, mothership, motor mouth, mouse potato, quetzal, preflight, pregnant chad, prenuptial, reflexology, scrutineer. Many, many to do with computers & the Internet with their little lightning bolt beside them.

Really Useful Stuff: Literary Links; Quick Facts; Synonym Essays; Punctuation; Language Notes; Commonly Misspelled Words; Entries with “Spellcheck” Notes; Tables and Charts. All you could ever want to know about computer-eze & the language of science & technology,

Exhilerating! Enticing! Dictionaries have at last caught up with us, & they did it in just 2 years - ah, computers! Ain't they grand?

All that over a dictionary - well, what can I say? ;-) I'm mad about words! One of the best investments you could make for the students in your life, no matter what level of education they're at!

Do catch my August 2001 Editorials containing Encarta® Dictionary Literary Quizzes compiled by Anne Soukhanov, Editor & Encarta® Dictionary What Is It? Quizzes & Spellcheck Cautions compiled by this Editor.
(08/05/01)

Rebecca