My wife gave me a Kindle for Christmas. It is light in weight and long in battery life, and I imagine it will be quite a handy thing to have, given the amount of travel and document reading I need to do.
What really pleases me, though, is that the Oxford Dictionary of English is preloaded.
I have not previously looked at the ODE (formerly the New Oxford English Dictionary). It purports to be a completely separate dictionary from the OED, but to be based on the same evidentiary principles. It is of course slighter than the OED: although the number of entries is similar, it does not have the OED’s millions of citations, and its etymologies, though adequate, are briefer.
e.g. for gold:
[Quote]Old English, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch [I]goud and German [I]Gold, from and Indo-European root shared by YELLOW.
It does not give pronunciations for most words, even if the pronunciations are highly irregular or counter-intuitive, which would slightly reduce its usefulness to some whose native tongue is not English. Where it does give pronunciations, IPA is used, happily.
It does seem to be more up to date than the Shorter OED or the Concise OED.
To have the OED in my pocket remains the dream but this will do for now. Thanks, dear.
