You'll never again be at a loss for words

CD-Rom review

One of our greatest reference books is now available on CD-Rom. Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (Cambridge University Press) is the first electronic version of the 1755 and 1773 editions, which were previously available only in expensive facsimile texts.

Four editions of the dictionary were published in Johnson's lifetime. The first and last are considered the most important because they show the full extent of his understanding and mastery of the language. In the first edition, for example, the word "law" has five meanings. By the fourth, it has 12. Side-by-side viewing of each text enables the user to compare the differences. The American DynaText software system makes this possible on the CD-Rom, which also has digitised images of original pages, and page breaks matching the original.

The two editions have a combined total of four million words, featuring 86,000 entries, 141,000 definitions and 222,000 quotations, so the software's retrieval facility is vital - and is about as accessible as it can be in a large-scale electronic reference work.

The DynaText system, hitherto used only in aviation, government and telecommunications in the United States, lets users build their own table of contents, expanding or collapsing it to provide the detail they need. Clicking on an item in this list automatically scrolls the corresponding text section.

The disc uses hypertext links - cross references within the data - to associated material such as diagrams and tables. The CD-Rom comes with enhanced fonts for better onscreen legibility. It runs on PC Windows and Macintosh.

It is 250 years since Samuel Johnson entered into a contractual agreement with a consortium of London booksellers to write an English dictionary. The nine-year slog of compiling and defining that followed had him complaining of the "vast sea of words" which he had taken on. But his persistence paid off. It was Johnson who first used quotations to illustrate shades of meaning within the definition of a single word - a technique that is still used by the Oxford English Dictionary.

This is a CD-Rom aimed at the specialist and academic market and its price reflects this. But if, like me, you are a closet dictionary reader, pounds 195 is a small price to pay for the mother of all dictionaries.

'Samuel Johnson - A Dictionary of the English Language on CD-Rom', edited by Anne McDermott, pounds l95 plus VAT, published by Cambridge University Press.