Oxford Dictionary English-Hebrew/Hebrew-English (Pocket Paperback)

Large View 

The Oxford Pocket Dictionary – English-Hebrew / Hebrew-English (OPD) is a reliable and user-friendly edition, which makes the most of its pocket-book format. It is easily portable, despite its 725 pages. The print is clear and the layout – two columns per page – comfortable to scan. Words are easy to find, with the help of word-headings on the top-outer corners of each page, and shaded letter tabs. The coverage is up-to-date, taking account of computer terminology, and including some words absent even from the more exhaustive (but sometimes less contemporary) Oxford English-Hebrew Dictionary. Glosses are simple but accurate, and the headwords usefully cover irregular past and past participle verb forms, plurals of nouns, and comparative and superlative forms of adjectives.

Because of its size, however, OPD necessarily has some restrictions. It omits phonetic transcription, illustrations, and other ancillary material, and makes no distinction between homonymy and polysemy. The use of sub-entries, in which the headword serves as a component, is limited, and some expressions which would have been listed as sub-entries by other dictionaries function in OPD as headwords. For example, specific gravity comes as a headword after specification rather than being listed under specific. At times, however, the dictionary’s anomalies cannot beg the excuse of economy. For instance, when the gloss of the noun is long or includes sub-entries, the verb is listed as a separate headword, yet when the gloss is short, the verb may be listed separately, or under the same headword, without any obvious logic. While the choice and spelling of headwords reflect American conventions, British expressions are used sporadically (e.g. doughnut (GB) appears but not donut (US)), often without any indication of the difference (cf. dial/dialling tone).

OPD is bidirectional, but unequally balanced between English and Israeli. The English-Israeli section (454+16 pages) is almost twice as large as the Israeli-English section (253 pages). The two sections are also inconsistent in their range of usage labels. The English-Israeli section has only one label, colloquial, denoting register, and none denoting style (e.g. archaic), field (e.g. Theatre) or geographical distribution (e.g. US). However, in the Israeli-English section, figurative (cf. נחשול, מעטה), literary (e.g. עתה, נחתום, ציה), military (e.g. פלוגה), and slang (e.g. צ'חצ'ח), as well as colloquial (e.g. פלוס), occur.

The readership to which OPD is best suited is native Israeli speakers who are not beginners in English. Beginners would find it difficult to cope with the absence of phonetic transcription and examples of usage. Still, OPD could help experienced learners of Israeli too, through its inclusion of details such as the transitivity of Israeli verbs. However, the omission of prepositional complementation is less helpful. If a student of Israeli encounters המליץ ‘to recommend’, s/he cannot tell that it is המליץ ל... על... himl?ts le- al-. OPD usefully specifies the gender, and sometimes the plural form, of Israeli nouns. It also stipulates the gender of Israeli numbers, a detail which would certainly help not only to students of Israeli, but many native speakers too…