Advance English Vocabulary (3 Vols-Set)

"This book can be a handy reference work to consult when you do not wish to pore over a selection of your other dictionaries, grammar textbooks, style sheets, spelling lists and writing guides. Within the pages of a usage guide resides a huge amount of information, readily available. With its entries arranged alphabetically and including functional cross-references, enables easy access to solutions to many common usage issues.

You would use this book to learn which prepositions are used with insist (on or upon), whether more important is more correct than more importantly (there is some dispute, but they are essentially equally correct), and how to pronounce-- and whether to use--hiccough (pronounced the same as hiccup and still correct although not as often used as the shorter word).

To find exactly what a word means and where it comes from look it up in this book. This book is a reliable source of definitions plus correct spellings, pronunciations, parts of speech and derivations. To use this resource book effectively however, you must understand the abbreviations it uses and the variety of information it includes. Since you may find a variety of definitions for a word, always fit the definition back into the original context to be certain it makes sense. Sometimes it\'s a matter of not being able to recall the right word; sometimes we never knew it. It is also frustrating to read a newspaper or homework assignment and run across words whose meanings elude us. Language, after all, is power. Building a vocabulary that is adequate to the needs of one\'s reading and self-expression has to be a personal goal for every student, author, writer and speaker.

This is incontrovertibly the most comprehensive dictionary available. It is extraordinarily well structured and the definitions are lucid." (jacket)