From the Publisher

The Collins Spanish Unabridged Dictionary is simply the best Spanish dictionary you can buy. Here's why:

More than 750,000 entries and translations. The Collins Spanish Unabridged Dictionary gives you comprehensive coverage of both Spanish and English and the most up-to-date business, political, and technical terms. Native Spanish and English speakers worked side by side to create a balanced treatment of both languages and to make authentic and appropriate translations.

Clear, helpful layout: This fully updated edition of the Collins Spanish Dictionary offers a fresh and easy-to-read color layout and special layouts that highlight idioms and key lexical structures both in Spanish and English. In addition, the most complex entries have been given a special layout to make lookup quicker and easier. Coupled with this is the addition of the latest words in both languages, which makes the Collins Spanish Unabridged Dictionary the most modern, accurate, and user-friendly Spanish-English dictionary available.

More colloquial usage than any other Spanish dictionary: With its emphasis on current Spanish and English, both written and spoken, including all areas of modern life and featuring regional usage, the dictionary gives you the edge in finding the correct translation.

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HarperCollins Spanish Unabridged Dictionary, 8th Edition

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Introduction

Since it was first published to great critical acclaim in 1971, the COLLINS SPANISH DICTIONARY has become one of the most highly-respected reference works of its kind. The extent of its coverage together with the clarity and accuracy of the information it gives have made it a recognized authority in the field of Spanish-English EnglishSpanish lexicography.

While building on all the strengths that have made the COLLINS SPANISH DICTIONARY so popular, including features such as the Language in Use guide to self-expression and the recent innovative encyclopaedic and usage boxes, this latest edition marks an exciting new step forward. As well as adding a wealth of new words and expressions which have come into the language since the last edition, we have used the huge English and Spanish databases developed through the groundbreaking research into computational linguistics carried out by COLLINS in partnership with the University of Birmingham since the 1970s to refine existing entries, senses and phrases. These multi-millionword corpora are collections of texts held on computer, which provide numerous examples of how words are actually used in the widest possible variety of contexts, be it in newspapers, in literature, in official reports or in ordinary spoken language. In much the same way as scientists who analyse objective data to confirm their hypotheses, dictionary editors now have access to vast databases of hard facts and evidence to back up their own linguistic intuition. The result is a degree of accuracy and depth of coverage that would be impossible to achieve using traditional methods alone.

One of our greatest challenges, given the sheer wealth of information to be presented, was to make such a sophisticated reference work simple and quick to use. The result is a completely new layout, designed to make different senses, set structures and idioms easier to locate even in the longest entries, which have been given a special treatment all their own.

By combining the tried-and-tested strengths of the existing dictionary with a new and innovative approach, we feel we have taken the most significant step forward in Spanish-English lexicography since our first edition in 1971. We are confident that the COLLINS SPANISH DICTIONARY will continue to be a valued companion for students, teachers, translators and language enthusiasts alike.

Continues...

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Excerpted from HarperCollins Spanish Unabridged Dictionary, 8th Edition by Wayne HarperCollins Copyright © 2005 by Wayne HarperCollins. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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