Review of the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary CD-ROM
The content
The Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary CD-ROM software is included with the paper version of the 16th edition of the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (you can also buy a cheaper version without the CD-ROM). Like the book version, the software contains 215,000 phonetic transcriptions of English words, including inflected forms and proper names, covering both British and American pronunciation. For more information about the transcriptions, see our review of the book version.
Apart from the transcriptions, the CD-ROM version offers a few additional features. Some of them, e.g. sound recordings, are typical of a software dictionary. Others are quite novel, e.g. the Sound Search and pronunciation exercises. All the features are described below.
The CD-ROM does not contain the information panels from the paper version.
Install to hard drive
The setup program for the EPD offers an "install to hard drive" feature, which is absolutely necessary in every software dictionary. It lets you use the dictionary without the CD in your CD-ROM drive, so you don't have to look for the CD when you want to look up a word.
Basic interface
First of all, the software loads quite slowly. It took about 10 seconds to load on Tom's Pentium III, 733 MHz machine. For comparison, the Collins COBUILD on CD-ROM takes only 2 seconds. When you run a software dictionary, you want to look up some words as quickly as possible. You certainly don't want to stare at the welcome screen and the publisher's logo for 10 seconds.
Looking up words is easy. You don't have to press any special buttons — just type the word and press Enter. That is good.
The entries are easy to read. The font is very readable and you can choose from three text sizes. What's important, the developers did not simply copy the layout from the book dictionary, which has very little space. Instead, they tried to take advantage of the large amounts of free space available on the screen. For example, the software lists full inflected forms of words (starts, starting, started, etc.), not just the endings (-s, -ing, -ed, etc.). This may be a small thing, but it improves readability.
The interface in the EPD is very nice and easy to use. Our experience was very pleasant until we discovered that the dictionary does not play well with others. It reserves the audio resources of the operating system and "forgets" to give them back. This means that as long as the EPD window is open, you cannot play back any sounds in other applications. You cannot, for example, open the EPD and the Collins COBUILD on CD-ROM at the same time, and listen to recordings in both dictionaries. The EPD recordings will play fine, but recordings in the other dictionary will not.
The EPD doesn't even want you to listen to mp3's. When I (Tom) tried to play an mp3 file while using the EPD, Winamp crashed in a very ugly way. A few days later, I forgot about the bug and ran Winamp again, leading to another crash and causing me to loudly call the dictionary a "piece of s---".
(Note: If you use Windows XP, you probably won't notice this problem, because Windows XP can handle multiple applications accessing the audio device at the same time.)
Recordings
The sound recordings in the EPD CD-ROM are a bit disappointing. The back cover of the EPD says
"spoken pronunciations for every entry". However, it does not say that the software only has
a recording for the first British pronunciation in every entry. It does not include
recordings for the other pronunciations. For example, the dictionary
gives two British transcriptions of pure:
/
/
More importantly, there are absolutely no recordings of American pronunciations in this dictionary. Even typically American words like flashlight or Maryland are pronounced by a British speaker. We realize that space on a CD is limited, but at least one American recording for each entry would have fit on the CD, since all the dictionary's files take up only about 400 MB.
The quality of the recordings is very good. The pronunciations are very clear and they usually match the first listed transcription exactly, with only occasional minor differences. Such accuracy is rare in other dictionaries.
To get an idea, listen to these sample recordings for aspiration, microeconomic, practicality, caricaturist, malevolence, and servicewoman.
As you can hear, the recordings are read by a few different speakers. In our opinion, the speaker who reads the first two recordings has an especially nice pronunciation. The last word is a rare example of a technical imperfection in the recordings (hissing sound in the background).
Sound Search
The EPD software has a nice feature called "Sound Search" (see screenshot to the right). It lets you find all the English words that match a given pronunciation. You input the pronunciation using phonemic symbols. Wildcards are permitted — ? substitutes any single symbol and * substitutes any number of symbols (including no symbol).
Here are some examples of what you can do with the Sound Search:
-
Search for words ending in the vowel.
If you turn on the "US only" option, the search will find words like flaw and
claw. With the "UK only" option, it will also find words ending in -r
like adore and poor.
-
Search for words where the
vowel is unstressed
(such words are rare in English) by typing in
*'???** and **'*.
The first string finds all words where there are at least three sounds between the
stress symbol (
) and .
The second finds all words where the comes before
the stress symbol. In both cases is unlikely to be stressed.
-
Find out how many English words contain the schwa ().
The number is 71,505 out of a total of 119,000 transcriptions (60 percent).
The search works quite fast; however, it has a few small bugs (see the "Bugs" section below).
Voice recording
The EPD comes with a voice recording feature, which lets you record your voice and compare it with the "official" pronunciation in the dictionary. This can be helpful, as learners sometimes think their pronunciation of a word was OK, even though it was not. They notice the difference only when they listen to a recording of their own voice.
The voice recording feature allows learners to record their pronunciation many times, listen to it, and get closer and closer to the correct pronunciation. Of course, the feature will be useful only to learners of British English, as the dictionary contains only British recordings.
We liked the fact that the dictionary keeps things simple and lets you record and listen to your voice with three simple buttons. Many pronunciation improvement products try to seem "high tech" by displaying silly, useless waveform graphs that tell you absolutely nothing.
Exercises
The dictionary software includes 15 pronunciation exercises. In all of them, you read and listen to an English sentence and then answer a question about the sentence. 13 exercises involve identifying one of the sounds in the sentence. The software displays a few choices and you're supposed to click on the right phonetic symbol. Example subjects of the exercises are: "short vowels", "diphthongs", "the letter 'a'", "the letter 'u'", and "words containing 'ough'".
The other two exercises are "How many syllables?" and "Stress patterns". In the first one, you're supposed to determine the number of syllables in words like genalogist and miniature. In the second, you identify the stressed syllable.
Each exercise contains about 50 sentences. All the recordings are spoken by the same excellent British speaker who did (in our opinion) the best recordings in the dictionary. Here are just two examples to give you an idea: example 1, example 2.We liked the exercises, because they teach beginner learners to recognize various sounds of British English and to write those sounds with phonetic symbols. Learners can also practice their British pronunciation by repeating the sentences after the speaker.
Bugs
Here are some of the smaller bugs (programming errors) in the EPD CD-ROM dictionary (all the big ones are discussed above):
- There are some problems with selecting text. Often, you hold the mouse button and move the mouse, but text is not being selected, so you have to try again.
- When you paste part of an entry into a word processor, the dictionary does not copy information about the fonts. As a result, phonetic transcriptions are not displayed correctly in the target document. You can fix them by changing the font to "Ipa-samd Uclphon1 SILDoulosL" (this font gets installed together with the dictionary).
- You can't move the cursor by clicking your mouse in the Sound Search text box; you have to use the keyboard. This is inconvenient, because you use the mouse to input the phonetic symbols.
- You can't modify your search string after you click "Find" in the Sound Search. If you look at the results, and then open the Sound Search box again, your previous search string is lost and you have to input it again. This is especially annoying when you input a complicated search string and then want to modify it.
-
When we searched on *
* in the Sound Search,
the word mathematical was found.
The transcription for this word does not contain .
- French characters like è or à are displayed incorrectly.
Conclusions
If you often have problems finding the pronunciation of a word in your dictionary, get the EPD CD-ROM. You will get quick access to a huge number of pronunciations, including pronunciations of proper names and various forms of words.
If you're learning British English, the exercises in the dictionary will help you learn the British sounds and their phonetic symbols. The dictionary will also give you easy access to very high-quality British recordings and will let you practice imitating them (with the voice recording feature).
If you teach English pronunciation or you are a serious learner, you will like the Sound Search. It will let you do research on a large database of transcriptions — for example, find example words with a given sound or sounds. If you're a teacher, you can use these examples in pronunciation exercises with your students.
Buying information
You can buy the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary with CD-ROM from Amazon.co.uk for about $30.