New Oxford American Dictionary 3rd Edition 3rd Edition

Used book: I ordered a used book without the dust cover and with some minor wear added during shipping. The book also has a strong, but not offputting, leather smell to it.Manufacturing on the specific book: The book has a fold built up over the last hundred pages (or so) with an uncut piece of the text block folded over the end paper, like a cute little floppy tail.The edge indexing is functional and desirable, despite thumb or tabs being superior, in my opinion. The font is inviting, there are a reasonable number of quality images in the text as well as usage notes and additional information. The only downside is this odd fascination with not giving American dictionaries the IPA, a system every school student should be taught, however I'll just end up using the web for pronunciation. I'd say it's a very attractive dictionary and I made a solid choice in choosing it as my browsing and reading dictionary.

I've always been a firm believer that every home should be a hard copy of a great dictionary. I'm an avid reader and a lover of words. This dictionary is the only one you will ever need and provides hours of entertainment, full of amazing knowledge that does not need to be plugged into Wifi! It's HUGE...weighs about 8lbs! I've always been partial to the american heritage line of dictionaries, however the colossal edition of the aforementioned seems to be out of print. So, I decided to proceed forward with purchasing my first Oxford American Dictionary and I am beyond pleased. Well worth every penny of the purchase price!

Thank you very much!

I have a Merriam Webster Collegiate that I like a lot. A Random House Unabridged that I also like a lot. The one thing they both have in common are the lettered, indented tabs to assist the user in quickly getting to any given letter within their respective groups.This Oxford Dictionary does not have the tabs, but I am able to find a given letter quickly with no problem. For what it's worth on that subject, I'm 57 years old at present and, looking back I recall being in 5th grade, doing dictionary exercises (for getting to a letter in the alphabet quickly by estimating where the letter's section would likely be)starting. We did that often and it is one of those things that have just stuck with me.I don't know if less experienced dictionary users would share my experience in getting quickly to their letter of choice in using this dictionary, but possibly.So, yes, I find this very easy to use. It's a good size if you're in want of a medium large sized dictionary. (I wanted one similar in size to those found in libraries myself. That size wouldn't be practical for most standard sized two bedroom apartments. With that, I have 3 dictionary's in "my" comfortably sized two-bedroom apartment.)Quite frankly, I like this dictionary a lot. As it turns out, I like all of my dictionaries though. I recommend this one. What would you do if there were a solar flare occurrence that knocked out a satellite or two and caused a disturbance affecting internet access? This is not a far-fetched concept. This is a potential reality we could be confronted with at any time. Cell phones, internet here one day then ZAP, gone. What happened? What's the point?The point is: that with no internet access to google a word, if you need a definition, there's a better chance than not that your good old trusty, hard-copied dictionary(ies) will be there for you to reference in the event of a bad-case scenario.I would definitely recommend this as something to keep around the house. You shouldn't have a problem finding any words. Come to think of it, with the lettered tabs, there's a few letters on each tab and you end up having to go one direction or other usually to get to your letter-section of choice anyway. They're all great if you ask me. Finally, as I recall, none of the dictionaries are ridiculously priced at all: this one included. This is definitely a good one, it has some interesting pictures that the other two I mentioned don't have. I would buy another copyt of this Oxford again if anything happened to the one I have if that's any help.

My first purchase ever from Amazon was a dictionary, the 1996 Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged. I chose it because it was the only dictionary I could find that had "bonobo" and "urtext" in it, two words I'd recently found use for. Now I needed (ok, wanted) a newer and equally encyclopedic one for my home office and chose this one because it was the most recently updated and also one of the best choices according to Amazon customer reviewers.Here are a few things I've discovered during initial browsings:This 2010 Third Edition New Oxford reveals its British roots with the inclusion of "gastropub," the exclusion of "second base," and its failure to capitalize the "R" on "Realtor"--a trademarked industry-invented name, like Kleenex, that requires a cap "R" whether we like it or not.While both my '96 Webster and '10 New Oxford have entries for "pimp mobile," only New Oxford has one for "OMG," "dumb blonde," "snotty-nosed" and "Risorgimento," a word you'll need to know before watching the great Visconti-Burt Lancaster classic "The Leopard." (And watch it you should, in Italian with subtitles...but I digress.) "Philamerican," which I have just come across for the first time in Antonia Fraser's new book "Must You Go?" isn't in either dictionary.I'm sure continued browsing will reveal all sorts of words previously unknown to me that I'll not be able to live without--for example, this classy sounding five-syllable word for the willful shirking of duties: "esquivalience."New Oxford's "ready reference" extras include: a glossary of some 700 or so British and American English terminology equivalents; Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Russian alphabets; chemical elements; standard weights and measures with metric equivalents and conversions; texts of the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and its Amendments, the Gettysburg Address, the New Colossus and the Pledge of Allegiance; US Presidents and their Vice Presidents through Obama/Biden; US Chief Justices through Roberts along with landmark Supreme Court cases 1803-1989; US states and their postal abbreviations, capitals, mottoes, nicknames, dates and order of statehood; Countries of the World with population estimates and 12 pages of black and white world maps.I find the typefaces easy to read, particularly the contrast between the boldfaced words, lightfaced definitions and italic examples. And I like being able to find a pronunciation key in all the right hand corners.This 2,016-page book comes with six months of free access to the Oxford online dictionaries, which I've not yet tried.Update 2/5/12: OOPS & ALAS! Just discovered, quite by chance, while looking for it elsewhere, that the word "esquivalience" mentioned above is not a real word. Several Google sources are reporting that the Oxford editors made it up to protect their copyright of the online version. Too bad. I rather liked it, myself.