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Literary Review
User-friendly utility
CAMBRIDGE Advanced Learner's Dictionary, published in India, may be the latest of the Advanced Learner's Dictionaries on the market. The book claims to include 1,70,000 words, phrases and examples, and over 1,000 new words (such as "clickable" and "9/11").
Like any other comparable dictionary worth its name, it does contain words, pronunciations, parts of speech, meanings and examples, which form the core of the volume. There are the introduction, suggestions and guidelines on how (best) to use the content, and further help at the end by way of additional information.
What make this venture special are a few innovations. Regarding the content, for example, two things catch your attention straight away. The meanings are not grouped together along with the word marked as different parts of speech. Each variation, whether of meaning or part of speech, gets an independent mention as a separate item introduced by the word in blue print. "Principal", with its three different meanings and as two different parts of speech, has three independent "paras". Similarly, "of" is honoured with 19 entries and "to" with 18.
Again, even before the title page and immediately following the flyleaf, there is a list of "Style and usage labels". And just after the entry of the last word, "zzz", there are 10 different segments: Idiom Finder; Word Families; Geographical names; Common First Names; Prefixes and Suffixes; Irregular Verbs; Regular verb tenses; Symbols; Units of measurement; Pronunciation: phonetic symbols, stress, syllables, strong forms and weak forms.
Besides, almost at the very centre and a little after the first half of its 1,550 pages, the book provides 38 pages of very practical and useful matter: 16 pages of colour pictures of natural and manmade objects, and the rest of study sections of practical help. Three of the 17 entries here are "Computers, text messages, e-mail", "Relative clauses" and "Letter Writing".
Another feature is the difference between U.K. and U.S. English, whether of spelling, pronunciation, meaning or usage, indicated wherever necessary with the entry. As a bonus, the volume also comes with a CD-ROM, a User's Guide (for Windows 95/98/NT4/2000/ME/XP), which is in a jacket on the last page. All this arrangement is presumably conceived of as concrete assistance.
There may be occasional lapses like the one that strikes the reader's eyes. On page 26 of the Study Pages, there are two examples of the defining relative clauses from which the relative pronoun can be left out. The explanation and the Note are absolutely correct. But the first of the two examples is "wrong", since the relative clause with the relative pronoun and its version without it are one and the same. Both have missed out the relative pronoun "that". The second example, however, is unblemished.
On the whole, Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary of 2003 persuades one to think that it is a Learner-friendly/User-friendly publication.
Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary (with CD-ROM), Cambridge University Press 2003, xii+p.1550, price not stated.
MURALI N. KRISHNASWAMY
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