Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1 livre + 1 CD-ROM) (en anglais) [Anglais] [Broché]

This is an extraordinary document. Contains your normal 100,000 english words BUT they have trawled TV, magazines, radio, newspapers etc to find what are currently the 3000 most commonly used words. These words are shown in the dictionary in RED.

Secondly, and perhaps more usefully, the definition of all 100,000 words is written with a limited vocabulary made up of the 2000 most popular out of the 3000. This means when you find a word 1) you know if it is commonly used and 2) you will almost definitely understand all the words used in its definition.

To add to this there is a killer CD which gives access to a whole lot more words from the Longman database but not in the printed version.

Students improving vocabulary, writers striving for plain english and students of english as a foreign language will find the package invaluable.

One more remark about the technical quality of the Longman CD. I have checked it one more time and now my opinion about it is even worse. It took 40 seconds for this CD-ROM dictionary to begin giving me definitions for the verb ?get? and additional 50 seconds to complete this process. The same things for the same word required only 2 and 20 seconds, respectively, for the Cambridge Advanced Learner's CD-ROM Dictionary.
Furthermore, the number of steps required to hear words pronounced in the Pop-up mode of the Longman CD is actually FIVE (not three, as I said in my previous review). After third step, i.e. after clicking on the loudspeaker icon in the pop-up window, main desktop with the text is inactivated and for the next word you must first click on it. Also, you have to point cursor to the loudspeaker icon.
So, in the Pop-up mode of Longman CD when working in the net to hear word pronounced you have to 1. Point cursor to the word, 2. Click mouse, 3. Press ctrl key and wait a lot of time, before word with its definition appears in the pop-up window, 4. Point cursor to the loudspeaker icon, 5. Click mouse again. And repeat all this for every next word!
In the QUICKfind mode of the Cambridge Advanced Learner's CD-ROM Dictionary only by moving cursor from one word to the next, without clicking mouse or pressing any key even once, you can actually hear all words as if someone were reading whole sentences aloud! You can even minimize QUICKfind window if you want to hear words pronounced, but don't want read their definitions.
Also, I think that the SUPERwrite mode (for writing) with SMART thesaurus (for finding synonyms and other related words) of Cambridge CD is much easier to navigate and more helpful, than the Language Activator of Longman CD. First, Activator mode occupies whole screen and you can't work in the Word or write an email and see the Activator window at the same time. In SUPERwrite you can. Second, to get word in the Activator you have to come from the main dictionary or alternatively, type or paste word in the Activator search. In SUPERwrite you only point cursor to the word and it immediately 'jumps' to the SUPERwrite window. Third, the number of the words presented in Activator is very limited and the information provided is sparse, whereas SUPERwrite has SMART thesaurus for every entry and you can also find information about Collocations, Verb Endings, Word Buildings, Common Learner Errors and Usage.

Several reviewers have complained about the CD being slow. My experience was worse than that -- I had great trouble installing it, and when I did finally get it installed, it wouldn't run.
Then I did what I should have tried in the first place. I copied the entire CD to my hard disk and ran the setup program from there. It installed in seconds, it works perfectly, and it's blazingly fast. With hard disk space now at 50 cents a gigabyte, don't even THINK of running the LDOCE dictionary from the CD.
This dictionary is intended for adult learners of English, but it's useful for native speakers as well. Each time you run LDOCE it opens with a random word. The first one that came up was "ibuprofen," which it defines as (a). MS Bookshelf defines it as (b). 'Nuff said.

a) a medicine that reduces pain, inflammation, and fever.
b) a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medication C(13)H(18)O(2), used especially in the treatment of arthritis and commonly taken for its analgesic and antipyretic properties.