Pocket Oxford Russian Dictionary

Competent smaller dictionary. However mine fell to pieces as well which is why I am here buying a new one. A plot by Amazon, methinks !

LARGER THAN EXPECTED (0/1 people found this helpful)

When i was buying this item i thought it would be compact, small handy dictionary- "POCKET". However after i recieved it , i realised that its size didnt fit the description on the front page"pocket dictionary" because it wouldnt fit your pocket and would take up a lot o room in your handbag! However it's content is good as usual oxford dictionaries.

What every learner should have... (1/1 people found this helpful)

If you want to learn Russian one of the first things you should buy is a dictionary. This is the one I bought. This does everything it says on the tin - it's a Russian/English dictionary. It might not fit in your pocket, but I have never met a 'Pocket' edition that did. This is a great resource for anyone learning, it's easy to carry about and is something that you can have on hand. Recommended.

Excellent little dictionary (1/1 people found this helpful)

I use this dictionary every day, and I absolutely love it. I have used other 'pocket' sized dictionaries and I have always found their lack of vocabulary frustrating. The Pocket Oxford dictionary seems to be only lacking in obscure Russian internet slang, which isn't really surprising or much of a problem.

The only downsides are:
1: The English to Russian half doesn't have the declensions of words - you have to look them up again in the Russian to English half.
2: It is terribly badly bound. A millimetre of glue is all that holds the pages in, and it isn't enough. My first copy fell to pieces after about three months. I am not heavy handed - I have other dictionaries that have lasted 15 years or more with the same use. I find the dictionary so useful that I just bought another one to replace it.

Unless you want a dictionary you can pass on to your grandchildren (or even your children), I would definitely recommend this.

Emphatic thumbs-down (8/19 people found this helpful)

For a work which incorporates the word 'pocket' in its title, this latest (third) edition of PORD (PORD 3) is positively E-N-O-R-M-O-U-S. Approaching the bulk of a standard British house brick, it does not go even close to fitting in any normal pocket. Nor is it a lightweight, weighing in at a thumping 840g. In sharp contrast, its nearest competitor as a self-styled 'pocket dictionary' the diminutive Langenscheidt Pocket Russian Dictionary - tips the scales at a mere 310g. Although marred by a host of editorial shortcomings, this last work at least conforms physically with its description: it says it's a pocket dictionary and, true to its word, it fits in a pocket.

Moving to PORD 3's presentation, the type used for the translations, especially in the English-Russian section, is too small and dense for comfortable reading. Oxford University Press's designers appear to be unaware that Cyrillic type, especially when tightly letterspaced, is harder to read at small point sizes than Roman, chiefly because it has far few ascenders and descenders.

Let's now turn to the editorial side of things, starting with the explanatory materials sandwiched between the editorial credits and the dictionary proper.

The first thing I noticed was the lack of any clear indication of what level of user this brick-like 'pocket' dictionary is aimed at. A curious marketing oversight.

Secondly, the explanatory materials are way too extensive, running to around 40 pages in all. A guide to the use of the dictionary and a list of abbreviations used are clearly essential, but detailed sections on English and Russian pronunciation would have been better relegated to appendices.

Within no more than a minute or two of opening PORD 3 I was alerted to the possibility that it might not live up to the claims of editorial excellence made for it: a crass proof-reading error was spotted just three pages into the 'Guide to the use of the Dictionary'. The phrase "& unless they have special semantic of syntactical features" should have read "& semantic OR syntactical features". Further evidence of a general lack of editorial rigour was soon to follow: in the section 'Abbreviations used in the Dictionary' the full form of var. is given as 'variant', rather than 'various'.
Despite the fact that at the time of writing the work has been reprinted twice, the publisher of "the world's most trusted dictionaries" has not seen fit to correct either of these errors.

Studying the list of abbreviations revealed other oddities. Why are the abbreviations arch. and obs. (which stand for archaic and obsolete respectively) required? Is archaic and obsolete vocabulary really deserving of inclusion in a pocket dictionary? The list also includes vulg. and offens. (= vulgar and offensive respectively).
Does vocabulary meriting these labels really belong in a work of such limited scope? Not just prudes and cranks will wonder on what basis the editors of this pocket dictionary - repeat, pocket dictionary - saw fit to devote no fewer than 18 lines to the f-word. Many Russian users in particular, along with those thinking of buying a dictionary for younger students, will question such a policy, wondering why the space - always precious in a smaller work - was not given over instead to more mainstream vocabulary.

The absence, on the one hand, of everyday terms such as 'Londoner' and 'trading' and, on the other, the presence of flavour-of-the-month neologisms like 'bling', 'chav' and 'phishing' and exotica such as 'yucca' are reflections of just how haphazardly the dictionary's English and Russian wordlists were arrived at. Consulting frequency counts and corpora in both languages confirms the editors' scant regard for scientific method. A check of the contents of the authoritative 'Oxford 3000' and 'Collins 3000' lists of English 'keywords', for example, revealed that approximately 150 are lacking in PORD 3. A check of the Russian words in Nicholas Brown's respected 'Russian Learners' Dictionary: 10,000 words in frequency order' (reviewed elsewhere on this site) revealed that around 300 are lacking in PORD 3. These statistics are quite damning.

Close examination of the dictionary text also reveals that there has been little or no editorial collaboration between those editing the two halves. As a result inconsistencies and oddities abound. Time and again, for example, translations in one half are found to be lacking as entries in the other.

A number of other editorial deficiencies were noted, including the use of 'nesting' in the English-Russian section, obliging the user to search for entries such as 'cockroach' and 'cocktail' not in their proper alphabetical place, but under 'cock'; the inclusion of 'buzzy' new abbreviations, such as DSL and DTD, but omission of much more common ones, such as BBC and NGO; the provision of a guide to letter- writing which contains vocabulary lacking in the dictionary proper and of a cultural realia guide which lists 'The Big Issue' but omits
'Big Ben'.

To increase its marketability PORD 3 has been provided with a user interface designed to cater for the needs of not just one, but both speech communities. Its implementation is poor, however - markedly poorer than that of, for example, the competing Collins Russian Dictionary. PORD 3's interface remains unduly Anglocentric. Throughout the Russian-English section, for example, part-of-speech indicators and usage-related abbreviations are still in English, rather than Russian.

The Preface promises the "clear labelling of US and British terms and spellings", but the editors frequently fail to deliver. The only translation offered for the Russian word 'trotuar', for example, is the unlabelled Briticism 'pavement', with no mention of 'sidewalk'; similarly, the English alphabet listed at the back (p. 920) does not give the US pronunciation of the letter 'z'. Scores more oversights of this kind were noted.

PORD 3 is also relentlessly 'Britocentric' in the matter of pronunciation, offering no guidance whatever on American and British pronunciation differences. Let those who doubt how great they can be look up words like 'clerk', 'derby', 'fertile' and 'vase' in a dictionary that does not duck this challenge.

All in all, I give PORD 3 an emphatic thumbs-down.

Pocket Oxford Russian Dictionary

Della Thompson

Reader Reviews:

Not bad overall (0/0 people found this helpful)

LARGER THAN EXPECTED (0/1 people found this helpful)

What every learner should have... (1/1 people found this helpful)

Excellent little dictionary (1/1 people found this helpful)

Emphatic thumbs-down (8/19 people found this helpful)

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