American Heritage® Dictionary — 4th Edition
By Enfour, Inc.
View More By This DeveloperOpen iTunes to buy and download apps.
Description
The entire 2,074 page, 7.5 pound dictionary with its nearly 300,000 terms –plus 64 thousand recorded sound files all available instantly at your fingertips.
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The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
America's favorite dictionary!!
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"In battle of the Big Three dictionaries, American Heritage stands out on iPhone" (4 mice)
— MacWorld
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This iPhone/iPod touch version has the entire 2,074 page, 7.5 pound dictionary with its nearly 300,000 terms –plus 64 thousand recorded sound files by native speakers– all available instantly at your fingertips.
More than 33,000 written examples, totaling 4,222,000 words, makes this largest mobile dictionary on ANY platform
The indexes alone are larger than most brand-name dictionaries. Even without the sound files, AHD4 would still be over 100MB and the largest dictionary in the AppStore.
Main Features:
❖ entire text of this best selling book
❖ complete front matter and appendicies
❖ three-way cross-referencing search
❖ real-time progressive look-up
❖ wildcard searches for crosswords or spelling
❖ internal hyperlinking & supports copy/paste
❖ pop-up pronunciation symbols chart
❖ IPA pronunciation symbol conversion
❖ etymology (word history) with root links
❖ professionally recorded sound files
❖ zoomable graphics
❖ unique two-way external application interaction
— only iPhone dictionary with external linking!
❖ bookmarks with editable notations
❖ automatic search history
❖ complete offline use - no Internet connection
The renowned American Heritage® Usage Panel, a group of more than 200 distinguished writers, scholars, and scientists, offers advice on problems of grammar and style; engaging notes explain word histories and clarify differences among synonyms; thousands of quotations and example sentences show words in context; and elegant definitions are enhanced by numerous full-color photographs, drawings, and maps, making this one of the most complete reference tool available on any mobile platform.
Reviews for the application:
"As apps go, only Enfour’s American Heritage Dictionary stands out for its graphic appeal and functionality. Although I was pleased to have so much lexical firepower in such a compact form, I was annoyed at how poorly the other dictionaries present on the platform." (4 mice)
— MacWorld
Editor's Choice. ranking = "Great"
— MacLife
★★★★★
Over 300 five-star reviews on the AppStore.
(and these were for just version 1.0!)
Reviews of the print version:
"The Best Dictionary...Designed to appeal to the eye as well as the mind, it is notable for its imaginative illustrations....This is a great family dictionary, and ideal for schoolrooms."
— The Courier Journal
"This dictionary, now in its fourth edition, makes it fun to look up definitions of words....This up-to-date and eminently useful dictionary features fabulous full-color design that quickly and effectively guides users to the information they seek."
— Library Journal
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The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
http://www.hmco.com
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Powered by Enfour's "UniDict Engine 2"
—lookup definitions from "SpellChecker"
—thesaurus links work with these products:
"Roget's II: New Thesaurus"
"Companion Thesaurus"
"Companion Synonyms"
What's New in Version 2.1.7
fixed an issue with graphics embedded in descriptions
Customer Reviews
Deleting Reviews
It's not cool that Apple and/or Enfour deleted all negative reviews for this app. The app should have been pulled from the store until it could run properly on the phone without causing damage to your data. Before the 2.1 software upgrade, this app had a good chance of destroying the data on the phone as well as your backups on iTunes, as it did to me. I don't care whose fault it was, the app should not have been sold in that state.
Now they delete any previous negative reviews. With ethics like that can anyone trust this company now with an expensive app like this?
An English dictionary nonpareil
I just purchased this application and I couldn't be more pleased to do so. Please ignore all the chuffing re the cost of this. I have been a fan of the AHD since its first edition came out when I was in middle school. For many years now I have used the third (print) edition and now I can take the latest version wherever I go on my iPhone. The AHD differs from many of its competitors in that it is a prescriptive, as opposed to a descriptive dictionary. I.e., it not only offers definitions, pronunciations, and etymology, but it also suggests "how" we can and should use the language, through the input of its esteemed Usage Panel of language experts, published authors, and writers. The panel is a richly diverse bunch: Wm. F. Buckley, John K Galbraith, Calvin Trillin, Mark Helprin, Katha Pollit, Richard Rhodes, et alii.
Every college freshman should have either the print version or this iPhone one. And every serious reader will benefit from the AHD.
No regrets here.
My Killer Application!
Some might think that a dictionary is just a dictionary, any dictionary will do just fine right? Well, actually no. There is a difference in the quality of dictionaries that can be found at the application store and also at bookstores. To start off a good electronic dictionary will run at about $75 USD. If you bought AHD4 as as book, it would run you at around $33 dollars shipped from Amazon, but Amazon is a heavily discounted store. Barnes & Noble has its online price listed as $48 dollars. The list price on this book is $60 dollars and please remember that this is a big book, it's 7.5 pounds. From this point of view the price of $29.95 is a very reasonable price when you consider the list price and retail price as if you walked into a store to buy it, now take into consideration that you can now carry a 7.5 pound dictionary in the palm of your hand and that $29.95 price tag doesn't seem all too bad. Also, remember that not all dictionaries are equally made. From the reviews I have read on dictionaries, the AHD4 is just as good, if not just slightly below in quality, when compared to the New Oxford American dictionary (not on the iTunes app store but I reference it to consider all dictionaries that may be available to you, electronic or paper). In short, the AHD4 and the OAD are two of the best dictionaries and which one is better is more of an opinion but no one will tell you you've made a bad chance by picking up the AHD4. In short it is a high quality dictionary and it is easily the best one available on iTunes.
So the source material for the program is good, but what about the software it's running on? I'm sure quite a few of you are wondering, who do I trust? The countless reviews stating this application constantly crashes and is worthless? Or the few saying they've had great success? Well here is my story concerning this application.
First I'll start off by saying I have an iPod Touch, I have no idea if an iPhone would have more or less problems, although I imagine it should be the same. So the author suggests downloading this over wifi, well that was a mistake in my experience. I downloaded it over wifi (I have verizon FIOS so the download was very quick) and after this I had to do a complete restore of my iPod. At that point I was thinking, "Great I should have listened to the reviews stating the application crashes". There are a few reviews stating the application works just fine though, so I read through those and took there advice as I had already bought the dictionary. So I did a complete restore and I loaded my applications one at a time starting with AHD4 and now everything runs great. I've been using AHD4 for several days and it hasn't crashed once on me.
I'm glad I got this dictionary and this is a killer application for me as I like to read and learn new words and I can now do this with a handheld device. I was going to buy that $75 USD electronic dictionary but this came along and if you own an iPod Touch or iPhone you just can't beat it.
- Category: Reference
- Updated Feb 18, 2010
- Current Version: 2.1.7
- 2.1.7 (iPhone OS 3.0 Tested)
- 312 MB
- Languages: English, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish
- Seller: Enfour, Inc.
- © Enfour, Inc 2008-2009
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone and iPod touch. Requires iPhone OS 2.2.1 or later.
