Cassell's Standard Latin Dictionary: Latin/English, English/Latin

click here for more details, find new or used items	D. P. Simpson New from £27.99 Used from £15.32 Pages: 912 (Hardcover) ISBN: 0025225804 Pub: John Wiley & Sons Pub date: 1977-10-01 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 123427

Reader Reviews:

Thank you (0/0 people found this helpful)

It's a beautiful book, excellent condition. Got damaged a little bit, but apart from this, perfect service! Thank you very much

Cassels' Standard Latin Dictionary (0/0 people found this helpful)

The content is excellent, but accessing it is slightly difficult. Many of the pages remain uncut from print, and the indexing 'system' inset into the page edges leaves much to be desired from an accuracy point of view.

Once you understand that what you expect to find will be in a slightly different place, then you will enjoy the wealth of informative descriptions necessary for a 'proper' Latin/English, English/Latin works.

Another very useful reference works I would rather not be without.

Get more out of your Latin (0/0 people found this helpful)

The best thing about this dictionary, and the thing that sets it above my Pocket Oxford and Collins dictionaries, is the amount of detail given for each Latin word.

Rather than just listing possible translations, Cassell's lists a word's literal and figurative meanings and also gives examples of its use, making it far easier to find a precise sense.

While the dictionary has an English-Latin section, the emphasis (quite rightly) is on the Latin-English, with more than two-thirds of the book dedicated to the Latin.

There is no grammar section, and irregular parts of verbs rarely have their own headwords, so Latin improvers (or duffers like me - caught out by mansum once too often) will still benefit from owning the Collins dictionary, which is very strong on irregular verbs.

Overall though, Cassell's is excellent value if you want to get more out of your Latin.

Physically, a half-FECITed, cheaply and badly designed book. (11/12 people found this helpful)

Not concerning myself in this review with the contents of this work; which I see others have covered already better than I could, I will describe to you the physical construction of the book at which I am disappointed, if not even appalled.
To begin vaguely, this book just does not feel like a dictionary. It seems as though real design might have gone into making this dictionary look and feel machine-mass-produced, thrown-together, and cheap.
It is too tall and flat to open easily as a dictionary of reference ought. The fore edge of the textblock looks as though it had been cut with a craft knife and an old ruler. There are traces of the glue - which I fear will have been relied upon more than any good stiching - at the top and bottom textblock edges near the spine. Worst of all, though, are the roughly-cut, orange-segment-like holes that highlight where one of six letters in the alphabet starts in the text: were this not a definite hindrance to thumbing through and turning the pages: making it feel as if the small sections between the holes should tear or bend, fold or crease within a days use, then they would still be completely superfluous: who, having used any dictionary for but an hour, could not open the dictionary within at most 10 pages of their word? How irritating these thoughtlessly designed orange-shaped holes are for those who have gained that simple feel for the book.
Personally, I should recommend your looking in secondhand-book shops for some old, then-still-properly-constructed Latin dictionary: you might be lucky and find an old leather book going for about the same price as this abomination.

Disappointing (8/9 people found this helpful)

This well-presented volume is a recension, by an Eton classics master, of the work by Beard & Beard originally published in 1854. The author gives a useful history of the dictionary in his preface.

My previous (and indeed present) copy is pre-1886, that is before Markham's 'improved' edition, which is the one known to all schoolboys until the 1960s.

I thought I'd upgrade to Mr Simpson's 1964 edition, as mine is very tatty, and also shows the marks of its time in the presentation - small print, shortened headwords, etc.

Reader, it was a mistake. The presentation is faultless, the price is amazingly reasonable, but the content has been most dreadfully cut about.

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