Paperback Oxford English Dictionary

I bought it for our kids as a reference book. They sit and read it! The only thing is, it doesn't have the rude words in I remember looking up up as a child.

Also has handy 'usage' boxes which gives direction on how some words cam be used.

Well worth getting in my opinion.

This is the first dictionary I reach for if I want to find a definition of a word. It's also the first book I reach for if I want information on a famous person, or need to know where a particular place is.

In short, it's a dictionary and encyclopedia in one very handy size.

Plus points:
> it's easy to find any of the 120,00 definitions: the letter markers are visible from the outside.
> includes a thorough mid-section on famous people and places
> plentiful grammar and usage boxes (e.g. between diffuse and defuse).

Oh yes, it's also less than £8. A literal bargain.

A compendium of 120,000 definitions advances itself as an uncommonly intimidating treatise but, lo, I garnered the tenacity to venture forth on an arduous quest of nigh incomprehensible magnitude. My pursuits of rhetorical erudition were both prolonged and tortuous. Indeed, I must yield that the whimsy of surrender infrequently manifested itself as a courtesan of nectareous temptation. Fortuitously, my resolve was but consolidated when I observed a distention in the radius of my parlance and the tender allure of acquiescence was hastened asunder. Indeed, I can affirm without recourse to fallacy that the juncture of my undertakings culminated most expeditiously- prior to the desistance of the tertiary synodic month.

In short, this exhaustive scholastic glossary of the English idiom was most appeasing to my propensity for the conglomerative acquisition of wisdom (although my spouse Doreen has experienced sufficient discombobulation as to articulate the apprehension that my prevailing manner of discourse is akin to that of a bovine sphincter).