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Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary For iPod Debuts

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 at 5:00 PM - by Staff

iPREPpress and Merriam-Webster on Wednesday jointly announced the release of Merriam-Webster's Pocket Dictionary for iPod, which contains 40,000 words and their definitions, a pronunciation guide, an abbreviation guide, and a Handbook of Style. Pricing is normally US$14.95, but it's available for a limited time for $9.95.

The companies also said that over the next two months they will release more references designed for use on the iPod, including Merriam-Webster's Pocket Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster's Rhyming Dictionary for song and hip-hop writers, Merriam-Webster's Pocket Atlas, and The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Quotations.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Apr 05, 2006 6:21 pm

Is "iPod" LISTED in the Merriam Webster dictionary?

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davebarnes said:

member since 12 Jan 2005 with 130 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Apr 05, 2006 6:35 pm

Pathetic.

Only 40K words when the English language has 700K. So they list 6% of the words and call this a success?

Let's do the math: 40K words at 2 KBytes/word is a whole 8 MB. Wow, I hope they aren't worried about using all the iPod's disk space.

,dave

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Apr 05, 2006 7:12 pm

Actually, that's not a failure at all. Yes, a multi-volume set of the OED may contain 700,000 words, but the standard $7 paperback desk reference version of the Merriam Webster contains approximately 75,000 words. So, 40,000 definitions with a style guide for $10 isn't too bad.

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davebarnes said:

member since 12 Jan 2005 with 130 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Apr 06, 2006 12:57 am

It is a very weak product.

$7 book -> 75K words.

$10 sw -> 40K words.

Printing costs for the book = $2.

Printing costs for the sw = $zero.

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Rainy Day said:

member since 07 Jun 2005 with 607 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Fri Apr 07, 2006 1:42 am

Doesn’t even appear to be a talking dictionary. I had the American Heritage Talking Dictionary on MacOS 7-9 and found it to be much more useful than i expected. I thought it was just a novelty when i bought it, but it turned out to be quite useful indeed. I miss it.

BTW: 40K words is more than most folks have in their vocabularies anyhow. Probably sufficient for 95% of the population.

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