New Oxford American Dictionary
Description of App
As Oxford's flagship American dictionary, the New Oxford American Dictionary sets the standard of excellence for lexicography in this country. With more than 350,000 words, phrases, and senses, and hundreds of explanatory notes, this dictionary provides the most comprehensive and accurate coverage of American English available.
The dictionary draws on the two-billion-word Oxford English Corpus and the unrivaled citation files of the world-renowned Oxford English Dictionary to provide the most accurate and richly descriptive picture of American English ever offered in any dictionary. The Third Edition offers a thoroughly updated text, with revisions throughout and approximately 2,000 new words, phrases, and meanings. Many new words relate to fast-moving areas such as computing, technology, current affairs, and ecology, while others have recently entered the popular lexicon. Usage notes have been updated in light of the most recent Corpus evidence, and a completely new in-text feature on Word Trends charts usage for rapidly changing words and phrases such as carbon, mobile, or tweet. In addition, the application has an attractive, modern new design that makes entries easier to read and find.
One of the hallmarks of the New Oxford American Dictionary is the way it reflects the living language. Unlike in more traditional dictionaries, where meanings are ordered chronologically according to the history of the language, each entry plainly shows the principal meaning or meanings of the word, organized by importance in today's English. Thus readers can be confident that the first definition they see is the one most likely to be used by people today, and is not a sense that has been obsolete for two centuries.
Offering clear, authoritative, and precise information, with the in-depth and up-to-date coverage that users need and expect, the New Oxford American Dictionary is the benchmark by which all other American dictionaries are measured.
Features
- Over 60,000 audio pronunciations for dictionary entries
- No wireless connection required (audio pronunciations require wireless connection)
- Offers the most comprehensive, up-to-date coverage of current English
- New "Word Trends" feature charts usage for rapidly changing words and phrases
- Powered by Oxford's extensive language research program, including the 2-billion-word Oxford English Corpus
- $29.99 represents a 50% discount from the $60 MSRP of the hardcover version
Version
Free or Paid
Compatibility
Device(s) App Was Tested On
VoiceOver Performance
Button Labeling
Usability
Other Comments
An increasing number of developers and companies are moving toward presenting information on the screen in the form of words which can be clicked to move the focus to a different screen. Sadly, this affects almost all premium dictionaries on the "App store" including this one. I think Apple should add a router option which, when selected, would disable the announcement of HTML elements in continuous reading (I mean with the two-finger down gesture). That would greatly help with such apps. One of the popular screen readers on Windows has such an option, and it drastically enhances the accessibility of such applications there.
Accessibility Comments
The app is fully accessible. However, the way information is presented on the screen and the way VoiceOver interacts with such applications make it very difficult to use. Each word appears on the screen as a link which can be clicked, so VoiceOver reads each word and then says "Link," then plays its normal VO sound which indicates a text boundary, then reads the next word, and so forth.