The Little Dictionary

A new edition of a dictionary originally published in 1995, this handy paperback version is ideal for the school bag, aimed at top infants and lower juniors. Around half of the 1500 entries are illustrated with photographs or artwork to augment their definitions, while useful themed picture pages – on cars or aircraft, the human body or musical instruments – give additional vocabulary. Plenty of features are included to help the reader pronounce tricky words, to deal with unusual plurals (such as goose and geese), and example sentences are given with each definition. Simple common words such as ‘my’ or ‘when’ are listed at the end of the book, although without any definitions you could still be stumped on whether ‘there’ or ‘their’ was the correct spelling. There are some occasional sloppy definitions (eg ‘a mother is a woman who has a child’ – no good for a cat then), but overall there is a balanced choice of entries. Interestingly the first definition of ‘great’ is ‘good’, as in ‘we had a great day’, but that for ‘mouse’ only includes the furry four-legged variety.