The Oxford English Dictionary is the internationally recognized authority on the evolution of the English language from 1150 to the present day. The Dictionary defines over 500,000 words, making it an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, pronunciation, and history of the English language. This new upgrade version of The Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition on CD-ROM offers unparalleled access to the world's most important reference work for the English language. The text of this version has been augmented with the inclusion of the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series (Volumes 1-3), published in 1993 and 1997, the Bibliography to the Second Edition, and other ancillary material. System requirements: PC with minimum 200 MHz Pentium-class processor; 32 MB RAM (64 MB recommended); 16-speed CD-ROM drive (32-speed recommended); Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 200, or XP (Local administrator rights are required to install and open the OED for the first time on a PC running Windows NT 4 and to install and run the OED on Windows 2000 and XP); 1.1 GB hard disk space to run the OED from the CD-ROM and 1.7 GB to install the CD-ROM to the hard disk: SVGA monitor: 800 x 600 pixels: 16-bit (64k, high color) setting recommended. Please note: for the upgrade, installation requires the use of the OED CD-ROM v2.0.

A comprehensive lexicon of American English includes 175,000 concise definitions; notes on grammar, style, and usage ; hundreds of world histories; illustrations; and three thousand biographical and geographical entries.

This new edition of Oxford's flagship single-volume dictionary brings you the results of the latest research into the real English of today. Oxford is lead partner in the British National Corpus, a massive and constantly expanding hundred-million-word database which allows dictionary editors to sample today's language - newspapers, magazines, books, advertisements, even transcripts of spoken English. With thousands of occurences ofeach common word available for instant analysis, lexicographers are able to track the latest trends in, for instance, spelling and hyphenation or disputed usages, with greater accuracy than ever before. This rolling, constantly updated `opinion poll of language' combined with Oxford's unparalleledworld reading programme (we spend more on language research than any other dictionary publisher in the world), ensures that COD9 is the up-to-date reference for today's English. Bigger and better than ever before, its new features include: * The most up-to-date spellings, with improved coverage of meaning and usage based on a computerized `snapshot' of today's language * 25% more content than the previous edition * New words, including such items as holiday village, nip and tuck, central locking, ragga, house-sit, Balti, pesto, Cajun, road-pricing, Feyman diagram, supermodel, and slaphead * New, more up-to-date pronunciation system, representing today's received pronunciation * Over 300 new boxed usage notes with guidance on good English * New, clearer etymologies * easier to use with more compounds as main entries

Compiled by a team of linguistics experts, this is a comprehensive pronunciation dictionary which gives phonetic transcriptions using the International Phonetic Alphabet for the rendering of words and proper names in both British and American English.

Provides definitions of words in contemporary use in English-speaking countries throughout the world, with examples of idiomatic uses, guides to irregular forms, notes on grammar and preferred usage, and lists of related terms.