Oxford Shorter English Dictionary

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is a distillation of the twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary into just two volumes: an incredible one third of the coverage of the OED in one tenth of the size. Including all words in current English from 1700 to the present day, it combines the world's best dictionary of contemporary English with a comprehensive account of the historical development of the language.

Over 600,000 words, phrases and definitions

- More than half a million definitions, covering dialect, literary, and technical vocabulary, as well as English from all parts of the world
- Includes 85,000 quotations to illustrate how words have been used by writers throughout the centuries
- Updated with 2,500 new words and phrases and thousands of newly discovered antedatings
- Pronunciations for words that might cause difficulty
- New introductory essay on the History of English by David Crystal
- Origin section for each word tracing it's history
- The price $49.99 represents a 65% discount from the original cover price