Concise Oxford Dictionary

Electronic dictionaries are becoming increasingly popular, and whilst I was initially a little sceptical about them, feeling that it was as easy to reach for the book on the shelf, there is no doubt that they do have their advantages.

The CD-Rom provides an easy to use and fully searchable version of the tenth printed edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD). It contains over 240,000 lexical items and the publishers are confident enough to assert that it 'defines every word that is in general use in Standard English today - in every variety of English worldwide'.



A new and helpful feature of this version is brought about by a change in the style of the entries, with the most modern or frequently used definitions now appearing first. The best way to operate this program is to install and run it from your hard disk. It takes up approximately 10Mb of hard disk space and if you can spare this then the COD will become a much more accessible and useful tool.

It will enable you to take advantage of features such as the 'Instant Lookup' facility, which allows you to check the definition of words from your web-browser or from applications within Windows. With the COD running in the background, simply double click on any word on the page and it will appear, along with its definition, in the dictionary window.

To make this even easier, there is an option to have the COD 'float' on top of your current application. This means that there is no need to switch from your document to the dictionary, as it will already be there in the corner of your screen. The window can be resized and moved to whichever part of the screen that you choose. I find however, that it still tends to get in my way and I prefer to turn off this feature, leave the window minimized and just click on it whenever I need to use it.

The application window itself is simple to use. It is divided into two parts with an input box on top of a headword index and an entry pane where the definitions are displayed. As you start to enter a word, the headword index will fill up with the closest matches to the letters that you have typed. This saves time, as it is possible to reach a definition from only the first few letters.

For example, should you ever need to know the definition of 'borborygmus' , the first four letters will be enough to cause the word to appear in the headword index with a definition in the entry pane. In addition to saving time, this is useful for those times when you may be uncertain about the correct spelling of a word. There is also the option to substitute a wildcard (*) for any number of letters.

The Full Text search allows you to search the database for all the occurrences of a word or phrase, with the option to narrow this down by the use of Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT).

I have a somewhat battered copy of the COD sitting on my desk, and although I do not foresee it becoming redundant because of my new electronic version, the electronic dictionary can certainly do things which our old paper friends can not.

By the way, I don't think 'borborygmus' is exactly in wide general use, but if you want to win the pub quiz, it means 'rumbling of gas in the intestines'.