Oxford Spelling Dictionary

Quite a lot, as it turns out. For instance, it shows distinctions between words which might be confused - as in hare/hair - and indicates parts of speech - as in double fault as a noun and double-fault as a verb. It also makes firm recommendations where there are variants in possible spellings (use judgement), shows where capitals are required in names, gives American spellings, and shows where logical word breaks occur for hyphenation and compounds.


This particular guidance makes it an ideal reference tool for those working with printed or word-processed text. The reference data is based on the reputable scholarship of the Concise Oxford Dictionary. It contains over 158,000 entries, and in the latest edition includes a large number of compound words as well as very basic information about people and places. So, for instance, Enver Hoxha is the Albanian prime minister, and Santa Catarina is a Brazilian state.

A typical entry on proper nouns shows the variants on a personal name, with the pipe (these things - || -) showing the word breaks.

Kath|er|ine also
Cath|ar|ine,
Cath|er|ine,
Cath|ryn,
Kath|ar|ine,
Kath|ryn

And the same presentation of typical word is rendered thus:

tar|tar + s
(deposit on teeth etc.;
violent-tempered person;
in 'cream of tartar'.
‡ tartare, ta-ta)

This last detail is an injunction that the term should not be confused with tartare or goodbye. Of course you still need some idea of how a word is spelled (or spelt) in order to look it up. But this dictionary makes the job less distracting than using a normal dictionary, because it eliminates all that interesting stuff. Less may not be more, but it's certainly faster.