Walker's Rhyming Dictionary of the English Language

by John Walker and John Longmuir

Book Overview

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.This work is in the "public domain in the United States of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0710022476
• ISBN13: 9780710022479
• Release Date: June 1979
• Publisher: Routledge Kegan & Paul
• Length: 558 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Oh so quaint

This is a very thorough rhyming dictionary. It is a list of words alphabetized starting from the back. These words then have a definition. (In cases where the ending on the word is pronounced differently than the same ending on neighboring words this is pointed out in the definition.) The main advantage to this dictionary is that it has a more extensive list of words than other rhyming dictionaries I have come across. The problem that I found in using this dictionary is that many of these words are very unusual or are outdated. Just to pick a random word from a random page: seiatherical - belonging to a sun dial. And another: Shough - a shaggy dog. If you used half these words then you may as well just make up your own words Lewis Carol style and then use an Oxford English Dictionary to prove that these words are in fact real but with an obscure meaning. I have an old edition of this. (It doesn't say when it was printed but I'm thinking sometime in the 40's or 50's. From the introduction I believe that this is a reprint of the 1851 edition, so that explains some of the oddities.) There is a modern revised edition available which might be useful, but avoid older editions. You will have to pick through a lot of anachronisms to use the book. On the other hand if you are cheating at scrable then this is a good backwards dictionary to use.