IF YOU LOVE WORDS -- their etymology, their antonyms, and their modern usage -- you'll love the CD-ROM-based Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Deluxe Electronic Edition. The 160,000-word dictionary falls short of the 200,000-word American Heritage and 315,000-word Random House electronic dictionaries, but Merriam-Webster more than makes up for it with its informative entries, powerful search routines, and clever word games.
Merriam-Webster's electronic dictionary includes biographical and geographical names, foreign words, and abbreviations. When you look up a word, you get much more than its definition. Separate fields for pronunciation, function, usage, etymology, and date of earliest recorded use bring out the stories behind each word. Synonym and usage paragraphs show you the differences between similar words, and sample phrases and quotations illustrate each word's current use. The dictionary is linked to a 130,000-entry thesaurus. Clicking on the Thesaurus button takes you from a word's definition to its synonyms and antonyms. However, you can't look up a word by double-clicking on it in a document in a word-processor -- a feature in other electronic dictionaries and in this dictionary's Windows version. Merriam-Webster says the Mac version will have this feature in a future release.
If you have 28 MB of free disk space, you can install the dictionary and the thesaurus on your hard disk, for fast searches. As with other electronic dictionaries, you can double-click on a word in any field to see its definition and use wildcard characters to find words you're not sure how to spell. But this dictionary's real strength is its unique search capabilities. For instance, you can type 1958 into the Date field to find all the words that were coined that year. You can do multiple-field searches by using AND and OR operators -- for instance, you can find all the slang words of Spanish origin. If you enjoy word puzzles, you can use the specialized searches to help you cheat, er, find the word or words you need. You can also do wildcard searches in the pronunciation field to find a list of rhyming words.
The dictionary has a few quirks. You have to click on a camera icon, which sometimes obscures the definition, in order to see an illustration. And the illustrations are indistinct. The online help has useful pronunciation and style guides, but the guides suffer from grammatical mistakes.
The Bottom Line
Despite a few annoyances, the Merriam-Webster dictionary is a fun and invaluable resource for anyone who works or plays with words.
Pros: Links to included thesaurus. Fast search engine. Unique types of searches. Comprehensive entries.
Cons: Cannot define words from within a word processor. Indistinct illustrations.
Company: Merriam-Webster, Springfield, MA; 800-828-1880 or 413-734-3134.
Reader Service: Circle #409.
In addition to providing definitions, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Deluxe Electronic Edition, can tell you when a word was first used, find synonyms, and even solve crossword puzzles.
