This is a damn good book, despite not having much of a plot, it's filled with every word, A to Z. What I really appreciated is that many of the words are obscure or little used in every day language, and the author(s) of this book took the time to supply the definition for each word they used. Awesome! A must read.
I swear by this book. I've read it cover to cover before, and I'm reading it again, going through with a highlighter to find my favorite words. This book should be a standard item to have. My paperback copy is well worn from countless use over the years.
I'm biased, having spent hours as a child with this book, I love it. Great memories exploring definitions and going between different words to figure out what words mean and how they're related. In the deluxe color edition, my brother and I enjoyed looking at the pictures of scientific references. I learned IPA with this book.
My exact edition is not listed here. I have ISBN 0-13-192659-4, published by Simon & Schuster in 1988, edited by Victoria Neufeldt & David B. Guralnik.
I confess; that I bought it because it was cheap and available.
I work best with hardback dictionaries at my work location. The cover finally fell off the old dictionary. I saw this one and it was cheap and available. I paid for it while the wrapper was still on.
Well, I may have made a mistake. First, this one has no index tabs. I looked up some well-used words such as "kine" and got just a two-word definition of cow and cattle. The previous dictionary “Webster’s II New Revised University Dictionary” described even the word history and covered the changes in history. It showed that the word came from Middle English as "Ku". And that persisted until the 17th century. This word is used in an Ayn Rand book and would not make sense if you only had the "New World College Dictionary" I also looked up acetylene and found a fair definition, but it had room for the formula and did not display it.
The definitions are squeezed out to make room for pictures. On the next page is a portrait of Martin Luther King. There are all kinds of pretty pictures of people. If you are interested in people and not spelling or anything in-depth, then this dictionary for you
In the meantime, I will suffer from this until I have time to find a real dictionary. However, it may do for you.
Practical info from the seventh edition – newer versions may vary:
7,500 entries for today's world.
Four-color world atlas and numerous tables and charts.
Thousands of Geographical and Biographical Entries.