Hebrew/English Dictionary

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This new work is designed expressly for the widest possible variety of interests and professions -- for students, teachers, travelers, home and office libraries. In it you will find over 30,000 vocabulary entries, alphabetically arranged. There is a comprehensive but compact explanation of grammar, including tables of irregular verbs. There are keys to proper pronunciation, abbreviations, up-to-date technical terms, examples of idiomatic usage, tables of numerals, weights, measures and currency.

This version of Ben-Yehuda's dictionary seems to have been printed using technology from the 1940s.

The paper is an acidic newsprint type paper. Just sitting on my shelf, the acid from the paper has burned into the cardstock cover, leaving yellowish brown stains.

The printed ink is not even a true black... but rather a faded dark grey that looks like a photocopy of a photocopy.

Because there are no crisp edges of the printed characters, it is difficult to tell a Hebrew "pe" from a "phe" and distinguishing a "gimel" from a "nun" is almost impossible. The differences in these characters are subtle in the printed form and having obscure/fuzzy printing makes it that much more troublesome to read.

Reading the English text is not problematic, mostly due to the thin, serif font used for the English. The thick calligraphic style of the Hebrew, however, leaves no room for error.

My buying advice is to instead get the "Shimon Zilberman Compact Up-To-Date English-Hebrew/Hebrew-English Dictionary" (ISBN: 9652227781) which is also available here at this site.com. There is simply no comparison.

I have to say that the content of this dictionary is fairly useful, except for some of the introductory grammar notes and verb tables. If you are a beginner in hebrew, you don't want to learn from this book, and you will be a little unconfortable browsing for the hebrew word you need.

Now, I must mention the print quality, which, in the reprint/edition that I bought in 2002, is very bad. The nikkud (the dots that indicate the vowels) are mostly readable, but often it's difficult to tell a gimmel from a vav or a nun, a pei from a fei etc. This might represent a severe problem with some readers like myself, and after a while you might end up with a headache and will tire quickly.

You can offset this disadvantage if you know really well the order of the letters in the aleph-beit, so you can easily guess the letter if you can't see it very well (unfortunately, this trick won't help you to tell a pei from a fei, as they are at the same ordinal place).

The best characteristic of this dictionary is probably it's ubiquitousness: you could easily tell your teacher that you didn't understand "the word on page 185, top left, in the Ben-Yahuda". The low price may be of some limited significance, too, but I think the most important factor when deciding whether to buy it or not, should be your eyes.