Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: Sixth Edition

In hardcover it takes up two thick volumes, but on CD-ROM you get the same 7.5 million words of text (with half a million definitions and 83,000 quotations) on a thin compact disc. The computerized New SOED is a great pleasure. It readily accomplishes the simple task of looking up a word, providing definition, usage, and simple etymology. But the program also searches by anagram and by rhyme, by quotation and by etymology. Perusing the headword group is like flipping the pages. In this fashion, I ran across "nesh" (soft--in consistency, mind, or morals), "convell" (refute completely) and "xoanon" (primitive carved statue of a deity). My Scrabble game is getting less nesh all the time. --Stephanie Gold