last of the proper dictionaries

This book is very wordy, verbose, and repetitious; it routinely uses multiple synonyms where a single well-chosen option would do, and sacrifices brevity and clarity for the sake of long words of obscure origin and infrequent usage.

Reading this book is difficult, not only due to the voluminous vocabulary, but because the text is rendered in incoherent phrases, among which grammatical sentences are rare. The text is supplemented by occasional illustrations; these are confined to small line drawings rendered in black ink, usually to illustrate an obscure object or animal.

The best feature of this book is its organization. A reader seeking all words beginning with a particular letter will find the page tabs very useful. What's more, although an index to the many terms and concepts is entirely lacking, the reader will have little difficulty finding them in the text itself due to the author's odd predilection for alphabetization. Anyone at a loss for words will find plenty of them here. However, casual readers will be unlikely to find that this book holds their interest beyond the first few pages.

I turn to this one when I don't want to page through my OED ( )

I haven't used a paper dictionary since discovering dictionary.com, but who knows when you'll need a low tech backup? It's not the OED, so more obscure words may not be included. Still, it's a decent basic reference book. ( )

This was presented to me at the end of my junior year of high school as the Brown University Book Award for doing well in AP English class. I hold onto it for sentimental reasons because in the age of the internet there's simply no reason to have a print version of a English language dictionary. If you insist however, here are the book's vital statistics: 7" x 9 3/4" x 2", maybe 4lbs, and I estimate about 66,500 entries. Accompanied by a dense introductory essay on the art and science of dictionary compilation that probably three people have ever read and appendices covering geographical names, rules of English capitalization, the proper forms of address for members of the U.S. government, and other magnificently arcane bits of padding.