desk dictionary

There was nothing to read but a Methodist hymnal and a desk dictionary.

He also gifted me with Robert's own, many-times-hand-repaired desk dictionary.

The first definition of "dowager" in my desk dictionary is:

But then I looked up "semiweekly" in my desk dictionary and verified that it only means "twice a week."

No matter what it says in Merriam-Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary...

The college edition is the official desk dictionary of the Associated Press and The New York Times.

But defibrillators are also now available as automated battery-driven devices that cost about $3,000 and are the size and weight of a desk dictionary.

My desk dictionary (the American Heritage College one) defines "lynch" as "To execute without due process of law, esp.

This edition when published was said to give more word definitions than any other British desk dictionary; including its main competitor, The Concise Oxford .

American Airlines, which was in the vanguard of domestic airlines with defibrillators, began putting the devices, about the size and weight of a desk dictionary, aboard its planes in 1997.

"It got a tremendous amount of use," said James G. Lowe, a senior editor at G. C. Merriam Inc., which publishes the nation's largest-selling desk dictionary.

It was edited by Joseph H. Friend and David B. Guralnik and contained 142,000 entries, said to be the largest American desk dictionary available at the time.

It is larger than the desk dictionaries of the time but smaller than Webster's Third New International Dictionary or The Random House Dictionary of the English Language.

As far as I am aware, what are called college or desk dictionaries in America have no special label in Britain, though several, notably the Collins Dictionary , are of comparable extent.

Feckless -"spiritless, helpless, futile"-is given in all my desk dictionaries, but only Chambers has feck (nice to see a lost positive found), which comes from effect through vowel-loss and is defined as "efficacy" or "quality."

Recently in Chambers I came across the adjective perjink , a Scots word given also in Collins , but not in any of the other desk dictionaries I use: it means "prim: finical."

Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary defines "personality disorder" as a "psycho-pathological condition or group of conditions in which an individual's entire life pattern is considered deviant or non-adaptive, although he shows neither neurotic symptoms nor psychotic disorganization."

No matter what it says in Merriam-Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary or in Webster's New World Dictionary, the possessive of a proper name ending in should be formed by adding an apostrophe and another .

Generally speaking, the smallest general dictionary in which one can expect to find fairly thorough treatment of etymology, pronunciation, definitions, and a good coverage of the language in a wide assortment of entires is the so-called College or Desk dictionary.

The wording in the new books, the Oxford American Desk Dictionary and the New Oxford Dictionary of English, is only slightly stronger than in previous versions, but the message is the same: If it sounds good to split, go ahead and do it.

For a desk dictionary (or college dictionary, as Americans like to call them) it is rather pricey at $36.95 in Canada-but I do not think that the ghost of my Scottish father glowered (good Scots word, that) at me when I bought my copy of it.

But John H. Dirckx, M.D., in an essay on etymology in the front of Merriam-Webster's excellent medical desk dictionary, shows how doctors have used "lively and even poetic compounds" to identify old ailments: these include frozen shoulder, bamboo spine, knock-knee, strawberry mark and the bends .