Hats off to Americna Heritage Dictionary of English Language.

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You are your words. Make the most of them. 
          So proclaims the cover jacket of American Heritage Dictionary of English Language (AHD). And it won’t take much time to prove it as we start our journey along. We need words for anything and there is a word for everything. Our task is to avail the exact one at the most demanding times. AHD is the name we can trust for that.
     
I owned one only recently. Actually, I was persuaded by my colleague Prof. Gulam Hussain Habeeb to buy one and I gain in gratitude as I keep using it. I hold that Bengali writer in high respect for he translated Five Hundred Years of Solitude to Bengali. To tell you what I feel after I began to use it is amazing. I really fell in love with. As I come home exhausted after a long session in the evening, I find it handy and allow myself wander through its pages. I get to know so many things with pictures that I see around for years but no idea about what to call them in English. I have a strong sense of achievement and enrichment in terms of my vocabulary for a short while now. There is always a sense of pleasure in getting to know something new. I think it is universal.

Professionally, we literature and language teachers are largely well versed in vocabulary related with linguistic, literary, cultural, historical, philosophical, and to an extent psychological ones. But when it comes to popular and scholarly scientific ones or any other major disciplines, a good number of us go clueless. We often have to use an explanatory sentence or two while there is a ready one word exactly for the thing or idea in question. It is a bit embarrassing as we teach ESP for engineering and medical students. There are several reasons for such an imbalance in word power mastery. But that won’t make a good excuse to save our skin. AHD can do a lot in bridging that gap. And as they rightfully claim… we don’t have to doubt my word choice again.

And it comes with a secret code that enables you to download and install the same in your iPad or smartphones once. Be careful that you can’t do it again once it is gone or uninstalled. This digital version makes the 3kg hardbound portable and ready to serve you at any time anywhere offline. We can spend our downtime with AHD’s 2112 pages with more than 4000 color images. They have got a very nice website if you would like to know anything more http://www.youareyourwords.com/

Comments

  1. ErichMarch 4, 2014 at 5:41 AM

    "There is a word for everything." Really? I think experience and doing and the products of doing come first, and naming later. Furthermore, I think words are very inexact, only approximate, and I have a healthy distrust of them. But I understand what you're saying. A South African author of juvenile books, Rona Rupert, put the following sentence into one of her characters' mouths: "Words are like sausage - highly overrated." I couldn't agree more. I think words are at the same time extremely useful and totally useless, depending on the context. Words are ultimately extremely limited.

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