Review: Advanced English Dictionary
Score:
82%
Version Reviewed: 1.6
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Right, you're down the pub and two of your mates start arguing about the weather. "A Cyclone is what they call a hurricane in the Southern hemispheres" says Fred. "No it's not, it's just another name for a strong wind" says Bert. "No" says Fred, "I'm sure I'm right, and also a Cyclone spins anti clockwise but a Hurricane clockwise. This is because the weather systems go in different directions depending upon which hemisphere you're in!".
Quick as a flash I pull out my P900 and tell them a Cyclone is “A rapid inward circulation of air masses about a low pressure centre; circulating counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern” whereas a hurricane is “a severe tropical cyclone with heavy rains and winds moving at 73-136 knots (12 on the Beaufort scale)”.
So there you have it, a total social disaster! What was developing into a good pub argument which could have kept people going for about half an hour has been stopped in an instant. This could severely cut down on pub conversation and lead to people having to go home early due to boredom.
And what was the cause of this social gaff? The Advanced English Dictionary. This purports to hold 140,000 defined words, all on the phone's internal storage. However, it's much more than just a list of word definitions, it also has encyclopaedic references, so you can look up people, places, etc, as well. All entries automatically have thesaurus entries displayed, if available, e.g. 'car' gives 'auto', 'automobile', 'machine' and 'motorcar' as alternatives. Each word can have several other drop down lists to give more information about it. For example car has additional lists for 'More General', 'More Specific' and 'Parts'. More General will give you 'Motor Vehicle' and 'Automotive Vehicle'. More Specific 'ambulance', 'bus', 'taxi', etc. And pressing Parts gives you a huge list including 'clutch', 'accelerator', 'wheel', and so on. It's quite true to say that the information this package puts in your pocket is huge! The word coverage is very good with most of the obscure words that I can think of being covered. This is a valuable tool if you like doing crosswords on the train or are writing a report on a plane.
Is it perfect? Well no, it's not. In the version I'm using (version 1.6) plurals (words meaning more than one) seem to be missing. Of course, this is not much of a problem for standard words that just need an 's' added to them (such as cars), but it IS a problem if you want to know that cacti is the plural of cactus or hippopotami of hippopotamus. However, I've been told that these will be included in a future release.
There is very little to say about the operation of the software, basically you type in part of a word and it lists alphabetically all the words that start with those letter combinations. It would have been nice if there was some spell checking software and crossword solving tools such as wild cards in the search string and an anagram solver. Again these are not in the current release but may be included as an additional download in the future. In fact, these extra searches are to be included in a client server version of this software which is in development for Series 60 and other J2ME devices. They have done it this way as the dictionary itself is large and takes up a hefty 6.3 meg of your memory card, and this is without the addition of plurals and the extra searches that are hopefully coming soon.
All in all, this is a very useful tool and I find myself using it daily. Just remember - when you are in a pub and two people are arguing about a small point of trivia, wait until they are just about to come to blows before whipping out your P900/P800 and resolving the issue!
Reviewed by Andy Langdon at