The MacMillan Visual Dictionary : English, Spanish, French, German (Multilingual)

A year later, in Seattle, I chanced to see it at a Barnes and Noble... in the discount stack, of all places. I snatched it up immediately. Some new employee had made a horrible mistake, I figured. I couldn't believe I was getting such an awesome book for the paltry sum of $40.

It appears I made the right choice, too. I checked on this just today to see if I could buy one for a friend as a present and I see that they are still out of print and that the cheapest they can be found is about $110... used!

This really is one of the best reference books I own. It might seem like 25,000 entries isn't many (for a dictionary), but keep in mind that they're pretty much all nouns and a few adjectives. 25,000 entries isn't much, but 25,000 nouns is HUGE.

Just this morning I was trying to find the French word for "okra". I have five other English-French dictionairies, but none of them had this word. Not even my nice, thick Oxford. But there it was on page 69 of my Visual Dictionary.

I guess I'm just writing this review because I can't understand how such a useful book remains out of print. I only wish they'd release another version with four more languages!

PS - In case you're wondering: okra = le gombo.


the greatest multilanguage dictionary ever made   June 4, 2002
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

This is the most useful and fun dictionary you will ever own. The illustrations are fantastic and wonderfully detailed, and on every subject imaginable under the sun, from bicycles to spaceships. You will not only find it an invaluable reference for the proper terminology in foreign language, but also in your own native tongue. An invaluable reference work for the multilingual person.


For the curious.   December 8, 2001
Leah Osad (Second Peter, Chapter 2, Minnesota)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

The knowledge in this book seems so basic, but there are a lot of words that I didn't know before. I'm mostly interested in how different the German words are from English. It is lucky for me that the English words are on the top of each list and German at the bottom, so I'm likely to see what I might know before I get down to what is really strange. I don't know Spanish or French either, but they might make some kind of sense to me. Each language has its own index in the back. If you want to see what pages the funny stuff is on, look up "infundibulum" in the English index. On the Reptile page (98), the VENOMOUS SNAKE'S HEAD is called "KOPF EINER GIFTSCHLANGE" in German. That's like calling a secret military tribunal a legal proceding.