The Dictionary of Unfamiliar Words: Over 10,000 Common and Confusing Words Explained

I have always enjoyed reading, writing and the meaning of words in general. Lovely book that is most engaging to go through at random or for new specific words.

Summary: If you’re a language nerd with a large English vocabulary then this book is going to be less interesting for you. However, if you’re learning ESL or just trying to widen your vocabulary, it might be a good learning resource.The book is divided into several sections based on a topic. It begins with language, including sections on idioms, English-English to American English, and foreign loan words. The bulk of the book, however, is what you might call “specialized language” around a specific topic. If you’ve ever taken an introductory class on something, and that class had words you were tested on, those are in here.I have to wonder, however, if the people who put together this book quickly realized that they weren’t going to have a very big “dictionary” if they only included truly “unfamiliar” words. So there are a number of words in here which feel like filler. Turning at random to a page in Environmental Issues, roughly 2/3 of the words are fairly common. Think: pesticides, pollution, population explosion, radioactivity, recycling, renewable resources, smog, solar power. These might be unfamiliar to someone who speaks English at a conversational level, but are pretty well understood by native speakers. On the same page you have PCBs, Ramsar Convention and salinization, which are more likely to cause a native speaker to reach for a dictionary. In sections about more everyday topics like food or fashion, the words seem even more basic, likely familiar if you’ve ever gone shopping before. Someone who doesn’t know anything about women’s fashion or cooking might be clueless, but I suspect that person is also not the target audience for this book.What’s most disappointing to me is that the back of the book presents some actually-unusual words. It feels a little deceptive to lay out argyle, catharsis, crobell and hedonism only to open the book and find words like “island” and “lake.” I can’t imagine either of those being “unfamiliar” unless you’re just starting off with English, and again, in that case, you’re probably not the target audience.I think that’s my biggest issue. I can’t quite figure out the target audience. It presents like a book for language nerds but it isn’t. It isn’t a great replacement for a Google search when the average person comes across a single, unfamiliar word. If you’re a geologist then you already know the geology words and then we’re back to searching unfamiliar words online.Fortunately, I bought a very cheap, used copy. I think I’d be more annoyed if I’d paid full price, but I didn’t.

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