New features on the CD-ROM
The unique package of materials for improving learners’ writing skills is backed up by another key development on the dictionary’s CD-ROM edition: an electronic thesaurus. Every single word, phrase, and meaning in the dictionary has been carefully coded so that it is linked to other words of the same type. This means you can click on the thesaurus icon next to any word or meaning, and get a list of other words belonging to the same semantic set. This gives dictionary users access not only to synonyms (such as different ways of saying angry, forget, or problem) but also to topic vocabulary (such as the names of every type of tree defined in the dictionary, or all the vocabulary you need to talk about the environment). With this combination of advice about writing, and access to synonyms and topic vocabulary, users of MED have an unbeatable set of resources for producing their own written text.
In another MED innovation, the CD-ROM also provides more than 1200 weblinks. If you want to know what the Bloomsbury Group was, what happens on April Fools' day, where Fort Knox is (and what goes on there), or who Bridget Jones is, you can start by looking them up in the dictionary. The definitions will give you the essential information, but if you want to find out more, you can now use the weblinks to connect directly to a carefully-chosen website which will provide all the information you need. The Internet is full of useful encyclopedic information, but it's sometimes hard to know which websites you can rely on - so we have done the work for you by selecting the best sources of information.
Teachers and students told us how much they appreciated the 'Advanced Search' functions on the original MED CD-ROM. We have now made these even better by adding a couple of new features. These include an 'Example Sentence Search', which gives access to all the examples in the dictionary. Suppose you want to look in more depth at the way a particular word behaves (for example, a verb like remember or a discourse word like however) - just type your word into the Example Sentence Search, and you'll see every example sentence in the dictionary that includes these words. Meanwhile, the new 'Extra Features Search' means you can quickly find every entry in the dictionary that has any of the special features such as weblinks, 'Get it right' boxes, sound effects, or metaphor boxes.
The clear layout of our original CD-ROM was much admired, and for the new edition we have made further improvements. Since we published MED in 2002, the growth of Internet search engines like Google has meant that people have developed new ways of finding the information they need. The new CD-ROM is designed to work in ways that will look familiar to anyone who regularly uses the Internet - essentially by putting users in charge and letting them decide how much (or how little) information they want to see. This means, for example, that things like metaphor boxes, inflections, illustrations and collocations don't clutter up the screen, but are available at the click of a button if you need them. Even better, the new 'Show More/Show Less' button means you can decide whether you want to see a dictionary entry in full detail (with all its example sentences and information about grammar) or just see an outline with only the definitions. For receptive purposes (when you are reading, for example) the 'Show Less' option may be all you need, giving a quick overview of words, even if they have several different meanings. But when you are working on a productive task, you will probably want to 'Show More'. It's up to you - and this theme of 'personalization' runs right through the new version of the CD-ROM.
We hope you will agree that - despite the success and popularity of the first MED - it was nevertheless a good idea for us to go on making improvements. Thanks to all our consultations with teachers and students, our extensive user-survey, and the many discussions with our panel of advisors (led by Prof. Michael Hoey), we believe we have produced a dictionary that will meet its users' needs even more successfully.