The coverage of lexemes larger than the word is extraordinary. There are entries for all of twenty common phrasal verbs checked and seventeen of twenty common idioms. Of thirty common idiomatic sentences (e.g., The coast is clear), twenty are entries or are explained in a glossed illustration. Most English dictionaries enter few of these; one of those that enter the most, Webster's New World Dictionary of American English, Third College Edition (1988), enters or covers only twelve of the same thirty.

Table 1

PHRASAL VERBS
catch on	come to terms with	set off
catch up	come up with	set out
cave in	crack down on	set up
come across	get away with	shape up
come by	give in	take over
come on	give up	take to
come to grips with	sell out

Table 2
IDIOMS CHECKED (ASTERISK INDICATES IDIOMS NOT IN UWD.)

PHRASAL VERBS
all ears	from scratch	piece of cake
as is	in the same boat	small talk
cost/pay an arm and a leg	left-handed compliment	this and that
far cry	*monkey on one's back	*time and (time) again
fat chance	no dice	to boot
for crying out loud	*on one's high horse	tongue-tied
for good		under the weather
free-for-all

Table 3

IDIOMATIC SENTENCES CHECKED	UWD	WNWD
The ball is in your court.	o	o
The buck stops here.	x	o
The coast is clear.	x	x
Come on	x	x
(One's) days are numbered.	x	o
The die is cast.	x	x
Don't hold your breath.	x	o
The emperor has no clothes.	x	o
The early bird gets the worm.	x	o
(One's) face fell.	x	x
The fat's in the fire.	x	x
(One's) heart is in one's mouth.	o	x
(One's) heart sank.	x	x
Here goes!	x	x
It's no skin off my nose.	o	x
It takes two to tango.	x	o
Join/welcome to the club.	x	o
The jury is still out.	o	o
A little.bird told me.	o	o
Look before you leap.	x	o
Mum's the word.	x	x
The pot calls the kettle black.	o	o
The roof fell in.	o	o
(One's) ship comes in.	x	x
The shoe is on the other foot.	x	x
There's more than one way to skin a cat.	o	o
Tongues wag.	x	o
The walls have ears.	o	o
The worm turns.	x	o
You can take it to the bank.	o	o

     Of lexemes not used in all regions, Canadianisms (e.g. serviette and zed) are included and labeled Cdn. A number of regional American terms (e.g., gunny sack and pop) are included but without indication of limited provenance. British senses of bird and biscuit are found, and the word bonkers, though only biscuit is labeled Brit. Not entered are the British sense of boot or the words aubergine, roundabout, or spanner. Scottish auld lang syne, bonnie, brae, and loch are entries labeled Scots. or Scottish.

     Informal usage is well covered. Of fifteen colloquialisms checked (e.g., 'em, 'n, uh-huh, sh!, ya), fourteen are entries. Of thirteen taboo words checked, six are entries, all but one noted as vulgar. Of five ethnically offensive words checked, only nigger is entered, with the label "offensive." These omissions may please critics who regard inclusion in a dictionary as a stamp of approval, but will not help learners of English as a second language. Of twenty other informal and slang words and phrases checked, fifteen are entries.

Table 4
INFORMAL OR SLANG PHRASES, WORDS, AND SENSES. (ASTERISK INDICATES THOSE NOT IN UWD. )

bad 'good'	duds	*plastered
bananas 'crazy'	duff	right on!
*barf	for real	ritzy
beat 'exhausted'	get cracking	split 'leave'
dig 'understand?'	*go 'say'	suck
dis	nuts 'crazy'	*tie one on
dough 'money'	*out of one's gourd

     Technical words and phrases are well covered: of fifty checked, forty-one are included. Among those included are black box, black hole, cell phone, boot up, broadband, hard disk, Internet, and the Web. Among those omitted are chat room, clip art, hyperlink, and web page. However, of fourteen often-used technical initialisms and acronyms checked, only five were found (DNA, IV, KWIK, RAM, ROM, but not AC, ATM, CD, DC, or VCR).

     The most common archaic or poetic words and suffixes are entries (e.g., e'en, thou, and -est). New words could be better covered. Of thirty new general words coming into use between 1988 and 1997, half are entries; of new computer terms, six of seventeen are entries (including browser, surf, and website, but not cookie, search engine, or URL).

     Overall, in a run of about 60 entries in UWD, compared with the same run in a British ESL dictionary of 70,000 entries, Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987), there are seven words or phrases in CCELD not in UWD, and 17 words and phrases in the larger UWD not in CCELD, as might be expected. Similarly comparing the same run in UWD and a larger American desk dictionary of about 150,000 words, Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition, the latter has 66 words and phrases not in UWD, and UWD has four entries not in MWCD. When one compares entries in two dictionaries, there usually are differences of selection, such as table salt in UWD, table wine in CCELD, and table sugar in MWCD. One entry not in either of the other dictionaries is ta-dah ("uttered when presenting a surprise"), reflecting the unusual coverage of colloquialisms noted above.

     Most kinds of information about entry words are provided. There are no etymologies, graphic illustrations, synonymies, or "Compare" cross references. Syllabification is indicated in headwords. Pronunciations are supplied for most words using a system introduced in Paikeday's New York Times Everyday Dictionary. Since few users consider the traditional pronunciation keys convenient to use, pronunciations are shown by respellings that rely on letter-sound associations which English speakers already have. Words spelled in conformity with expectations have no respelling; e.g., hat, hate, book, groove, dobbin, sound. However, simple respelling is not always adequate, and space-consuming notes are required; e.g., at troop is the note "(long "oo")"; at tour is "(TOOR, rhyme: poor)." At thatch and other entries with unvoiced th is "("th" as in "thin")," and at heather and other entries with voiced th is "("TH" as in "the")." Stressed syllables are in capitals. Canadian pronunciations may be given; of four checked, three were found, but only one was marked Cdn.

     Grammatical information includes part of speech labels (except at "Trademark" entries), the plurals of nouns if not formed with -s or -es, and principal parts of verbs if not formed with -ed. A new feature in UWD is the application of the label adj. only to words that meet all linguistic criteria for adjectives; the label adja. is applied to attributive modifiers like dwarf, and adjp. to predicate modifiers like alive. On the other hand, transitive and intransitive verbs are not distinguished by label but only by illustration, and collective nouns like furniture and information are not distinguished from those that can be used in the plural or after an indefinite pronoun. In ESL dictionaries these are distinguished as "uncountable" and "countable." In theory, additional grammatical information can be inferred from the illustrative examples, but those can show only what is typical, not what is unacceptable. Perhaps these are not matters the average user looks for. Moreover, constraints on verb use are weakening, and most speakers already know which nouns are collective.

     Constraints on use are indicated by the labels mentioned above (e.g., Cdn. and vulgar) and such labels as Informal, Poetic, Substandard, and Medicine, or by a note (e.g., "skinny adj. [unfavorable term when used of persons] lean or thin"). Acceptable combinations with other words - modifiers, verbs, head nouns, and prepositions - are indicated by means of illustrative examples; for example, at party n. the collocates "to arrange, attend, crash, give, throw a party" show verbs typically used with this noun. Of course, since not all acceptable verbs can be listed, the user can not learn that one does not "make a party."

     Meaning is explained in several ways. Each headword or main sense has a formal definition. However, Paikeday believes that traditional ways of giving information in dictionaries are often of little help to users. Abstract definitions often leave the dictionary user uncertain, and the examples given of their use are often inadequate. Experiments Paikeday conducted showed that not only students but also academics could not match definitions of multi-sense words in a standard dictionary with the examples accompanying them (Paikeday 1990, vi). To explain complexities of meaning, he provides for most words examples of use with larger than usual contexts. Many are sentences that have the ring of everyday English. They are not marked as quotations from the corpus, but may be based on it. The meaning of a run-in word is often worked into the explanation of a base word (e.g., at class 4: "a group of students, or classmates, instructed together, usu. in the same room, or classroom"). A meaning may be indicated solely by illustration; e.g., at fun n., one example runs in a phrase which is not formally glossed: "Guy likes to poke fun at or make fun of Cora's walk." A meaning may be explained by a paraphrase in parentheses; e.g., at whirl v. after "swing round and round rapidly" the last illustration is "Her head whirled (= `she felt dizzy') and she passed out." Sometimes space is saved by telescoping two definitions: "Canadian n. & adj. (a person) of or from Canada;" "run v. 1 (cause) to move at a pace faster than walking. He runs for exercise; She is out running her horse."

     The reviewer checked to see what changes had been made in UWD in response to criticisms by two reviewers of its predecessor, The Penguin Canadian Dictionary (Rooney [1994] and Steiner [1990]). Rooney (1994, 255) pointed out the inconsistency of Paikeday's objection to abstract definitions. and his use at the entry for coloration of "the state or manner of being colored." This is unchanged in UWD. Comparing this with the definition in Collins-COBUILD, this reviewer found "The coloration of something, for example of an animal or a plant, is the colours that you can see on it and the way that these colours are arranged in a pattern." One might have expected that Paikeday would at least supply a sentence or two to clarify the meaning, but there is none. Missing senses of grandfather clause and grand slam (Steiner 1990, 142) remain missing. Other targets had been revised or seemed debatable.

     As occurs in any inspection of a new dictionary, this reviewer also found some defective definitions. At the entry for a, the indefinite article, sense 2 is: "[used with "a" to refer to a single group] : a lot of hooks; a few boys." "Used with 'a'" does not belong here, but at senses of lot and few. A new entry in UWD, ebonics (which should be capitalized), is explained in a way that does not correspond to the evidence in "Among the New Words" (Glowka and Lester 1997, 298-99). UWD has "English as commonly spoken in the Southern U.S., esp. by Blacks; Black English." However, according to the citations in "Among the New Words," the word refers only to Black English or what is also called "African-American Vernacular English" and "Vernacular Black English." The words "Southern" and "esp." should be deleted. Mahomet is explained as "the same as MOHAMMED," but that is not an entry. Mohammedan is, but is explained only as "Moslem." One has to look up Moslem to find out that Mohammed was the founder of a religion.

     At the close of his review of The Penguin Canadian Dictionary, Steiner calls for "an extensive study to assess the effectiveness of examples versus definitions" (1990, 146). 1 would like to see assessments of the effectiveness of all methods of explaining meaning and use, singly and in combination. No doubt there are individual differences among users as to which ones most help them. UWD provides users with ready access to needed information about a wide range of words and phrases, in compact and affordable form. With its special attention to collocations, it is an interesting and useful contribution to the resources for answering questions about today's English vocabulary.

Benson, Morton, Evelyn Benson, and Robert Ilson. 1986. The BBC Combinatory Dictionary of English: A Guide to Word Combinations. Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Glowka, Wayne, and Brenda K. Lester. 1997. "Among the Near Words." American Speech 72.3: 289-313.

Neufeldt, Victoria, and David B. Guralnik, eds. 1988. Webster's New World Dictionary of American English. 3d College Edition. New York: Webster's New World.

Paikeday, Thomas M., ed. 1982. The New York Times Everyday Dictionary. New York: Times Books.

_________. 1989. Review of The BBC Combinatory Dictionary of English: A Guide to Word Combinations. Ed. Morton Benson, Evelyn Benson, and Robert Ilson. American Speech 64.4: 354-61.

_________. ed. 1990. The Penguin Canadian Dictionary. Markham, Ontario: Penguin Books Canada; Mississauga, Ontario: Copp Clark Pittman.

Rooney, Kathy. 1994. Review of The Penguin Canadian Dictionary, by Thomas M. Paikeday. International Journal of Lexicography 7.3: 254-156.

Sinclair, John, ed. 1987. Collins-COBUILD English Language Dictionary. London: Collins.

Steiner, Roger J. 1990. Review of The Penguin Canadian Dictionary, by Thomas M. Paikeday. Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society, of North America 12: 139-46.