Read Collins Spanish Dictionary Complete and Unabridged Collins Dictionaries Books

Product details Hardcover 2208 pages Publisher HarperCollins UK; 10 edition (April 1, 2017) Language English ISBN-10 000815838X

Collins Spanish Dictionary Complete and Unabridged Collins Dictionaries Books Reviews

• You can't judge a book by its cover. The cover on this book is unprepossessing but the content very good. I speak as a student of Spanish rather than a native speaker so can't judge the accuracy of translation but I do own several Spanish dictionaries and this is the most comprehensive as you would expect from the top level Collins dictionary.
• The more I use this dictionary the more I love it. I almost exclusively use the Spanish to English section so I can't comment much on the English to Spanish section. My favorite feature is that many words are broken down into different family of meanings, with non-trivial example phrases and copious idiomatic sayings. This provides a rich understanding of the nuances and range of a word's usage compared to a more basic dictionary that just lists a few of the ways a word can be translated.
  
  Coverage of colloquial phrases is top notch. For example, in a dialog I came across the sentence "Te estás quedando conmigo?" I knew a straight word-for-word translation would be "Are you staying with me?" But from context I knew that wasn't the intended meaning. This dictionary has, under quedar, that exact usage as an idiom meaning "Are you pulling my leg?" That exactly fit the context in the dialog. I have a few reference works of Spanish slang and colloquial usage, but the Collins dictionary has actually become my first stop when I'm trying to understand an expression like this.
  
  The main drawback to this dictionary is that it is quite heavily physically and the print is very small. This is definitely a book to leave at home on the arm of your sofa under a bright lamp. It would not be suitable to take travelling, and it would be a chore to lug it along to a class or study session. I am considering purchasing an electronic version just for the ease of use and portability.
• "We do not recommend our dictionaries for use on for Android or for Blackberry as headword search is not supported on these devices." Too bad, headword search doesn't work on for PC, either. Without headword search, what good is it?