Pride of place goes to Chambers Biographical Dictionary (9th edition, 2011) which provides more than 18,000 ‘potted’ biographies of exceptional quality. However, there is no doubt that the concentration and accuracy of the information in certain works makes them worthy of shelf space. With so much information being available online, one might ask oneself whether any other reference books were necessary for setters or solvers. Roget’s Thesaurus (Penguin Reference Library, 2002) is an extraordinary piece of work, but probably of more value to those who are interested in the association of concepts when expressed as words rather than to crossword aficionados. The best free online thesaurus for our money is the Collins one, which was revamped in 2016. The best ‘setter’ thesaurus that we are aware of is the Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus (2nd edition, 2007) – the dictionary part is basic, but the thesaurus (with which it is combined, dictionary part at the top of each page and thesaurus part at the bottom) is everything that the Chambers equivalent is not. The Chambers Thesaurus (2004) is quite useful for solvers but is not recommended for setters – some of the ‘synonyms’ which it offers are highly questionable, it lacks a number of more modern interpretations of words, and on occasion it will give intransitive verbs as synonyms for transitive ones, or vice versa. Whilst not quite as wide-ranging as Chambers, it now contains its fair share of archaic and dialect words and is recommended as the best free online dictionary. This is available as a paper version (12th edition, 2014) but is also available online. We don’t have the shelf space at the Clinic for the twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but an updated version is available on CD-ROM for Windows – it’s not cheap, but if you want to see examples of the usage of words, which often sheds considerable light on their meaning, it is a wondrous thing indeed.īlocked puzzles rarely quote specific references, but the principal reference for the Sunday Times cryptic is Collins English Dictionary. If investing significant funds in a paper-based Oxford dictionary, my preference would be for the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (6th edition, 2007). It does help to clarify the meaning of some entries in Chambers by giving a different perspective on them, but otherwise it doesn’t offer too many additional benefits. Note that the free online ‘Chambers Dictionary’ is not the crossword bible referred to above but is the Chambers 21st Century Dictionary, a pale imitation of the BRB.Ĭhambers is the standard reference for most barred puzzles, although some, in particular the Inquisitor puzzle in the i newspaper, also use the one-volume Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) – the third edition (2010) is the current version. The CD-ROM version has one advantage over the other versions, in that it does allow free text searching of the entire contents. There is a CD-ROM version available for Windows – this is quite expensive and is now also out of date (the contents are similar to those of the 9th paper edition, published in 2003). If buying the paper version, make sure you get the February 2016 revision of the 13th edition – the first printing (2014) was lacking all the ‘enriching’ words which had been marked in the 12th edition as being of particular interest! The versions available for IOS and Android are excellent and very inexpensive (the bundle with the Chambers Thesaurus is good value, although see the comments on the thesaurus below). On this page we talk about some of the works of reference in the Clinic library which solvers and setters might consider for their own ‘bookshelves’ (whether real or electronic).įor any solver or setter, the one essential part of their armoury is Chambers Dictionary, known as the BRB (‘big red book’).
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