Composition of Scientific Words

I use this book with my high school biology class. I hope it helps them get biology vocabulary words by understanding word meanings

Perhaps one of the best and most comprehensive book on scientific derivations available. Pretty much any word that you want to find is in the book with detailed explanations. I highly suggest this book for those who like studying languages and every science lab should have a copy available.

It is somewhat hard to say this of a book of more than forty years old but this would seem to be indeed what it is cracked up to be, an indispensable reference for anybody interested in the composition of scientific words. I would expect that someone would have come up with something better in the time since the appearance of this book (it first appeared in 1927, reaching the present form in 1956). However everytime I have a question on a scientific word this book produces something useful, usually an answer to my question or otherwise some interesting new bit of information.

The only quible I have regards printing quality. The original typography is very ambitious in trying to condense so much information on a page and it suffered a little in this facsimile reprint. Even so printing quality is pretty decent, it is just that it is short of the crispness I would like to see.

I am not sure how many people will read a review for book which is #174,000+ on Amazons list. It is certainly NOT a bestseller but it is a fantastic book nonetheless. If you are a taxonomer or just wish to know about word origins as used in scientific nomenclature, this book is for you. I must admit, I rarely use my copy but I have it when I do need it. Besides having derivations from Latin and Greek, it has explanations useful for people who may wish to synthesize words for scientific use. At times, it is fun to use this book as a guide and make up scientific words for the most mundane things - try it and see how wonderful something like a flyswatter can sound. Levity aside, this is THE 882 page authority on history of the English language, The nature of Greek and Latin and the formation of scientific terms.