Best Dictionaries & Thesauruses

With each of six spreads featuring one spectacular, large pop-up as well as booklets of smaller pop-ups and text, ENCYCLOPEDIA PREHISTORICA: DINOSAURS is a magnificent display of paper engineering and creativity — an astonishing book that will be read, admired, and treasured forever. Rendered in warm earth tones and speckled with splashes of color, the three-dimensional creatures move with a life of their own as they gracefully extend their bodies into a full stretch or lurch toward readers with jaws open wide.

One of the biggest problem areas for writers is conveying a character's emotions to the reader in a unique, compelling way. Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi are bestselling authors, writing coaches, and international speakers.

Second edition of the most highly regarded teaching text book on the Japanese language, covering speaking, listening, reading, and writing to cultivate overall language ability.

Special sections include: A Handbook of Style, Foreign Words & Phrases, Biographical Names and Geographical Names.

Special sections include: A Handbook of Style, Foreign Words & Phrases, Biographical Names and Geographical Names. The Merriam brothers desired a continuity of editorship that would link Noah Webster's efforts with their own editions, so they selected Chauncey A. Goodrich, Webster's son-in-law and literary heir, who had been trained in lexicography by Webster himself, to be their editor in chief. Assuming that a lower price would increase sales, the Merriams introduced the 1847 edition at $6, and although Webster's heirs initially questioned this move, extraordinary sales that brought them $250,000 in royalties over the ensuing 25 years convinced them that the Merriams' decision had been abundantly sound.

Second edition of the most highly regarded teaching text book on the Japanese language, covering speaking, listening, reading, and writing to cultivate overall language ability.

Filled with fun facts—for example, the first documented usage of “OMG” was in a letter to Winston Churchill—and Stamper’s own stories from the linguistic front lines (including how she became America’s foremost “irregardless” apologist, despite loathing the word), Word by Word is an endlessly entertaining look at the wonderful complexities and eccentricities of the English language. An Amazon Best Book of March 2017: “We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child,” writes Kory Stamper in her witty and surprising new book, Word by Word . And that’s why it flourishes.” Word by Word is part memoir, part history of dictionaries – in particular, those published by Stamper’s employer, Merriam Webster. The surprises come when she describes the difficulties of defining seemingly simple words like “nude” and “marriage.” Stamper and her fellow lexicographers work mostly in silence, but they can’t escape being drawn into our era’s vociferous political discourse. Along the way, there’s much pleasure to be had in Stamper’s down-to-earth, frequently ribald narrative style, which keeps Word by Word from feeling overly intellectual or highfalutin’. She has that special “feeling for language” she calls sprachgefühl: “the odd buzzing in your brain that tells you that ‘planting the lettuce’ and ‘planting misinformation’ are different uses of ‘plant.’” “Word by Word” offers laymen a glimpse into a crack lexicographer’s mind, and it turns out to be – definitively – a very entertaining place indeed. Stamper leads us through her own lexicographical bildungsroman, exploring how she fell in love with words and showing us how the dictionary works, and how it interacts with the world that it strives to reflect.” —Adrienne Raphel, The New Yorker “As a writer, Stamper can do anything with words. You will never take a dictionary entry for granted again.” —Mary Norris, best-selling author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen “A fascinating, even enthralling, examination of the way words actually work in our language, warts and all.” — The A.V. Stamper displays a contagious enthusiasm for words and a considerable talent for putting them together.” — The New Yorker “ Word by Word cherishes the dexterity involved in making dictionaries, and . Part of its quirky charm is a delight in the idiosyncrasies of others—not least Merriam-Webster’s many correspondents.” — The Wall Street Journal “Packed with the kind of word-lore that keeps readers and writers up late at night: Where do our words come from? An exuberant mash note to language.” — The Times Literary Supplement “[ Word by Word ] mixes memoiristic meditations on the lexicographic life along with a detailed description of the brain-twisting work of writing dictionaries.” — The New York Times “Anyone who loves words or has opinions about them will have fun in this sandbox of a book.” — The Washington Times “A delectable feast. [Stamper] declaims elegantly on the beauty and necessity of dialect, how to evaluate emerging words, and many other topics. [Stamper] presents passionate, precise, good-humored (and bad-humored) descriptions of every stage of the process that goes into making an entry.” — The Chronicle of Higher Education “[ Word by Word ] entertains as much as it instructs.” —Baltimore Sun “A captivating book.” — Lincoln Journal Star “Idiosyncratic and engaging.” — The Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA). “A smart, sparkling and often hilarious valentine to the content and keepers of dictionaries. A paean to the craft of lexicography.’” — Shelf Awareness “A funny inside look at how new words make their way into dictionaries, an irreverent take on the history of English itself, and a memoir of [Stamper’s] own journey.” — Daily Hampshire Gazette “[A] marvelous insight into the messy world behind the tidy definitions on the page. It is perhaps unsurprising, given her line of work, that Stamper employs words with delightful precision in her writing.” — Booklist.

Brits and Americans dress the same, eat at the same chain restaurants, pass music back and forth across the Atlantic, and our national leaders are practically conjoined twins.

With some one thousand entries, from “a, an” to “zoom,” that feature real-world examples of questionable usage from an international array of publications, and with a helpful glossary and guide to pronunciation, this precise, prescriptive, and–because it is written by Bill Bryson–often witty book belongs on the desk of every person who cares enough about the language not to maul or misuse or distort it. Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage as an authority, though he also makes a handful of references to recent texts, such as the Encarta World English Dictionary and Atlantic Monthly columnist Barbara Wallraff's "Word Court." Despite the revisions, the book often betrays its origins as a British text, as in citing words in common usage throughout the U.K. and British Commonwealth, but rarely used by American writers, such as Taoiseach, the Prime Minister of Ireland or City of London vs. city of London.

One of the biggest problem areas for writers is conveying a character's emotions to the reader in a unique, compelling way. Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi are bestselling authors, writing coaches, and international speakers.

Throughout the story are true tennis skills. I read 'Murphy Bear's Tennis Lesson' and thought it was terrific!