CASSELL DICTIONARY OF WORD HISTORIES
Edited by Adrian Room
This is a disappointing book. Adrian Room has produced a work that looks like a slim concise dictionary, containing both definitions and word histories. In many cases the latter are no more detailed than those you would get in any good college or desk dictionary, and shorter than in some. Typically they run to no more than two or three lines of small print, though some are more expansive. Oddly, the longer ones tend to be for less common words.
The range of terms covered is much wider than in most books on word history. For example, there are entries for cudbear, fissirostral, hamartiology, isopleth, outfangthief, preconise, recalescence, schindylesis, and sympiesometer. I’m not convinced this is a plus point, as these are words unlikely to be in most people’s vocabulary. Only two of them are in the Tenth Edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, which is more than twice the size. In a work of only 690 pages, it also means detail has had to be sacrificed. There are limited cross-references, so it’s not good at showing family connections between groups of words (a function that, for example, John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins is much better at, though his scope is a great deal more restricted).
If you want basic information on word histories, I’d suggest buying instead the biggest desk dictionary you can afford, which will be more informative both on definitions and (in some cases) etymology, and could well be cheaper. If you want to look in depth at the histories of words, better to get a more discursive book, such as John Ayto’s, or the Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories. Or you could buy the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology that was reviewed here a while ago.
[Adrian Room, The Cassell Dictionary of Word Histories, Cassell, London, pp690, ISBN 0-304-35007-9. Published 7 December 1999; publisher’s quoted price £25.00.]
