Content area
Full Text
Publisher: Pearson Longman, Harlow, 2007, £23.35.
ISBN: 978 1 4058 5138 1. Also available with a CD-ROM and in hardback
Suffering from dictionary reviewing fatigue, I tried to pass on the task of reviewing this Longman Business English Dictionary to another, but failed: "Anything except dictionaries!" was the anguished cry. But if I was expecting yet another pot pourri of exotic typefaces, a potage of cryptic esoterica, prolixity of pop-up boxes, or clutter of appendices listing US states, measurement tables and national capitals, with multi-coloured pages of student exercises, I was wrong. Not completely wrong, but wrong enough to thoroughly enjoy reviewing this offering from Pearson-Longman. In the crowded dictionary market, Director Della Summers and her team of editors, managers, lexicographers, computational linguists, database administrator, and all the others generously named in the prefatory matter, have managed to produce a thoroughly well designed, clearly focussed and, above all, useful dictionary - a dictionary pure and simple.
Since, in my balance sheet of pros and cons, the pros heavily outweighed the cons, I will start with some of the strengths of this medium-range, one-volume dictionary. These are, in no particular order:
- ease of use (clear page layouts with coloured headwords);
- wide international coverage (e.g. Deutscher Aktienindex, Nikkei Index, the Medicaid, and SARL...