The Hutchinson Dictionary Of Difficult Words

Most dictionaries are full of words that nobody looks up. The entries in this dictionary cover only the words that are frequently misspelt, misused, misunderstood, mispronounced or that are genuinely obscure.

Contains entymologies of thousands of English words, with information on language of origin, and including recently coined words such as disco and slang such as yob. It should be of use to anyone interested in the history of words and how language is used.

"Features more than 10,000 entries that focus exclusively on words that, while outside most people's working vocabulary, are often encountered in literature, in technical writings such as computing or medical terminology, and in such diverse subject areas as law, philosophy, and art. Special attention is given to easily confused or closely related words. Usage notes are provided to ensure that readers know how to integrate these words into their vocabularies for more precision and power in speech and writing."--Back cover.

Dendral? Lampadedromy? Here are more than 15,000 definitions of all the difficult and unusual words the reader is likely to encounter. Including foreign words and terms from the sciences and technology, this reference is invaluable to students, writers, puzzle solvers, and the general reader.