Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English

You looking to find the "Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English" Good news! You can purchase Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English with secure price and compare to view update price on this product. And deals on this product is available only for limited time.

   

Product Description

This etymological dictionary gives the origins of some 20,000 items from the modern English vocabulary, discussing them in groups that make clear the connections between words derived by a variety of routes from originally common stock.

As well as giving the answers to questions about the derivation of individual words, it is a fascinating book to browse through, and includes extensive lists of prefixes, suffixes, and elements used in the creation of new vocabulary.

</p>

Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English Review

First of all, the text itself is great, and I have little doubt that the paper edition is unproblamtic. My comments here apply only to the Kindle edition. The people who edited this fine text for the Kindle must not be Kindle users themselves. I recently needed the etymology of the word 'much.' However, the only way to get there is to do a search for the word 'much,' and of course, this produces 30 pages of hits, each with six results, or 180 all together. For each, the Kindle displays limited context, so you can rule out some of them, but others looked like the possible entry. After a few false hits, I finally arrived at the actual entry (from the 15th page of results), only for it to refer me to the entry for 'master.' This dictionary is full of such cross-references, which is fine except that they are not hyper-linked, so you will have to do another search or try to find the correct hit amongst the current search results. Thus we have a dictionary with no proper way to look up words. It's an extremely small minority of dictionary-users who read the tome cover-to-cover, and it's unfortunate that the Kindle edition was prepared in such an effortless manner that only such people are inconvenienced.

I implore the publisher to take this into consideration. Kindle editions can be revised and re-downloaded at no cost to the user, and I request such a revision. Kindle dictionaries actually have a look-up function which was not used for this product.

Weigh this complaint against the fact that this is a US$60 purchase and not the $9.99 that most non-academic Kindle books are priced at. I don't mind paying more for scholarly work (and fortunately my purchase came out of grant money, which is the only reason I'm not returning it), but given that the author has been dead for over 30 years, this is an awful lot of money to be going to editors who didn't do enough work on the Kindle edition to justify their job titles.

If the dictionary is revised in such a way that looking up words is a task easily accomplished, I will happily remove this review and replace it with the glowing review that the text itself deserves. I certainly don't think that the ability to look up words in a dictionary directly is an unreasonable request nor do I think implementing such a method would be difficult for the publisher as it involves a function the Kindle already provides but which the publisher didn't use.

Most of the consumer Reviews tell that the "Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English" are high quality item. You can read each testimony from consumers to find out cons and pros from Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English ...