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By Paul Biba

photo.jpgThe Register just gave a good review to an iPhone/iPod dictionary called Advanced English Dictionary. I’ts pretty cheap, at $0.99 and I bought it and added it to my collection of dictionaries on the iPhone (I also have Workbook and Dictionary.com). I like it a lot so far. The picture is a screen shot of the program on my iPhone.

AED is also one of the best-presented dictionary apps. The screen layout is attractive, the animations smooth, input is responsive. Words with multiple definitions are presented as a set of panels from which you slide and scroll from one to the next. It doesn’t feel like a port of an app from a lesser mobile OS as a fair few iPhone dictionaries do.

There’s no attempt to mimic the look of a paper dictionary. Instead AED uses the hyperlinking that computer-based databases make so easy to provide not merely a definition but a structured list of related words, allowing you to explore broader categories of word or drill down to more specific instances. …

Look up ‘Cheshire cheese’, for instance, and a link will take you up the hierarchy to ‘cheese’. From there, you can go up to ‘food’, ‘solid food’ or ‘dairy product’, or you can try out a selection of specific types of “solid food prepared from the pressed curd of milk”. Curd is linked to too, as one of the substances from which cheese is formed.

Where relevant, definitions are accompanied by lists of synonyms and antonyms, so AED can be used as a thesaurus.

The related-words list isn’t simply lexicographical. ‘London’ sits below ‘national capital’ and ‘England’ but above ‘Big Ben’, Old Bailey’, ‘Lombard Street’ and so on. As such, AED has the feel of an encyclopaedia about it.

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