Book Review: Webster's Spanish-English Dictionary

Title: Webster's Spanish-English Dictionary

(Review a dictionary? Why not? This web site posted an announcement or "review" of an Italian dictionary; here's the announcement or "review" of a Spanish dictionary I'm currently offering for sale in real life.)

Author: none identified

Date: 2008

Publisher: Merriam-Webster

ISBN: 1-40378-430-2

Length: 216 pages

Quote: "This Spanish-English dictionary has been edited with an eye to keeping the vocabulary as concise as possible and yet covering the most essential words in everyday use."

That's what you will and won't like. This dictionary is for English-speaking students in the first or second year of reading Spanish as a second language. (It could work in reverse, for Spanish-speaking people in the first or second year of using English as a second language, but it's designed primarily for English-speakers.)

(Note, also, that the dictionary I physically have for sale isn't even shown on Amazon now. What you see above appears to be a revised edition of what I have. Mine has a purple cover.)

No grammar information is given. For some obscure and arbitrary reason a decision was made to show the plural forms of all nouns, which are almost completely regular and predictable, but not the verb forms, a few of which are completely unpredictable. It's not standard practice for dictionaries to list each verb form as a separate word, especially in languages like Spanish where verb forms are agglutinative and can encapsulate complete sentences...but it would be useful to the beginning student who might try to look up se que and find se translated as "(to) oneself" but not se as "(I) know." Spanish verbs are truly wonderful things. They have an internal logic; once that logic sinks into your brain and becomes intuitive you have to admire the precise shades of meaning that are possible with Spanish verb forms, and the occasional whimsical leap by which "I know" appears as se rather than sabo, and "they went" is fueron rather than ieron, and so on. Spanish verbs, and their counterparts in French and all the other languages that abound in verb forms, have traditionally been felt to deserve a whole book all by themselves. The student should be mindful that this is because languages that are lavish with verb forms are fun. Really. If you're not trying to find a meaning for fueron in a hurry.

And there are a lot of everyday words, in Spanish and in English, that even the elementary school students for whom this dictionary seems to be designed are likely to use in casual conversation, that aren't in this dictionary. "Apple," "orange," and "banana" are listed; "tangerine" was dropped from the English list, although it appears as the translation for mandarina in the Spanish list; "blueberry" made the English list, although arandano doesn't get an entry on the Spanish list; "persimmon" isn't mentioned on either side, nor are nopal or tuna.

If you're looking for a useful word like arandano and not finding it, how frustrating is it to see "area nf area" and "aroma nm aroma, scent" on the page? Spanish-English dictionaries probably do need to list words like area and aroma that are basically the same in both languages because, of course, some words that look the same in Spanish and English are not (pan means the actual bread, not the pan the bread was baked in) and some are the same only sometimes (pasta means pasta, but it also means paste). Anyway it's useful to note that although el rather than la is the equivalent to "the" usually used with nouns that begin with A, aroma is grammatically masculine despite its A's at both ends, and area is not.

Webster's is a useful little book, coat-pocket-size. You will eventually outgrow it but, as with those Little Golden Book field guides my generation used as children, you don't need to be in any great hurry to discard it merely because it's small, short, and simple. Quite a few words that are neither obscure nor everyday, like (opening the book at random) hebilla, a buckle, or helecho, a fern, are in this dictionary. There's probably a fancy "app" that will list these words, or your selection of the ones you're likely to have to look up twice, as a "page" you can pull up on a cell phone; I prefer storing my word list as a document, because there's no additional charge, no need to use up phone memory, and also it's easier to remember words if I've typed them myself. If you want to create your own Spanish vocabulary document, Webster's is a starting point.