Review: Oxford Dictionary
Jaro 14. January 2008 :: dictionary, oxford
Since I installed Oxford Dictionary on my Nokia E50 I find myself using it almost every day. I read a lot of English books and whenever I come across an English word I don’t understand I open Oxford English Dictionary and find out its meaning. Using a dictionary on a mobile phone is much more comfortable than going to your pc or flipping through the classic book dictionary. That way I learnt many new words and I recommend this application especially to people whose native language is other than English.
Oxford Dictionary is not a cheap thing. It will cost you $39.95 to purchase a full license. However, you can first use the trial version and see if it’s the right thing for you. I’ve been using the trial version for 2 weeks now and it still didn’t ask me to purchase the product. The Oxford Dictionary website doesn’t say how long you can use the trial version but I guess it’s something around 2 – 4 weeks. Anyway, it’s long enough for you to decide if you need the software or not.
Features
Oxford Dictionary (or Concise Oxford English Dictionary) consists of 240 000 words and phrases. This is a huge database but despite its size, the dictionary works like a snap. Speed is a crucial factor in these kind of applications. User usually doesn’t want to wait for the search results more than 2 – 3 seconds.
The starting screen of the dictionary is basically a list of words with a search bar at the bottom. The matching words are highlighted as you type. Once you find the correct word you click on it and the page with definitions opens right away. The great thing is that you can further navigate to any word on the page; put focus on it with a cursor and press the center push button. Check the screenshots below to get a better image of the functionality:
Concise Oxford English Dictionary has some extra features that make it even more powerful tool. If you launch the options you’ll see:
- History – your last 15 searches are saved in History for better accessibility
- WildCard Search – this is a usual wildcard search; you can enter the star sign (*) if you are not sure whether a certain letter is part of the word or not (e.g. analy*e – could be analyse or analyze)
- Direction – if you have more modules in the dictionary you can select in which direction they should be used (e.g. English – Russian or Russian – English); at the moment Russian is the only extra language that Oxford Dictionary offers
- Flash cards – this is a very interesting feature; you can add any word to the Quiz and later run the Quiz to see how many of the words you went through you still remember
- Virtual Keyboard – I’m not sure what’s the real use of this feature
Settings
In the settings you can setup the sound volume, font size, full screen, translation from clipboard and auto-update interval. Quite rich setting options compared to some other 3rd party applications. Especially font size option can be really useful for people who have problems recognizing small letters.
That’s pretty much it. I hope this review will encourage you to download and try this great application. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below.
Download Oxford Dictionary for Nokia
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I have installed Collins dictionary almost since I bought my E50. Apart from the classic dictionary features, it also has a verb conjugator and a number translator built in; very handy indeed. I simply love this app, and here’s the list of language modules I bought: – English dictionary – English Cobuild for students – English Thesaurus – English-French – English-German
That’s quite a lot of money, but it worths it, and I hope I will be able to install it on my next S60 phone too (skipping E51, I think I may go for the soon to be anounced E71).
I’ve recently installed this dictionary on my e50, and since then I use it every day. It’s like I am carrying around the book dictionary everywhere I go. I’ve got the book (oxford advanced learners dictionary) and it wheights more then 2 kgs. The one on my phone is much more confortable! :-)
I’ve also installed the oxford concise medical dictionary (for my work; I read a lot of english articles in biology) and the Oxford dictionary of idioms, which have been proven also very useful.
I recommend them for everyone, it’s worth buying them.