Compact OED

I think it was around January 7,2005 that I had my first book review published by amazon.com. I was a little nervous about submitting the review, what with performance anxiety and stuff but I gritted my teeth and submitted.
Much to my surprise my review was published , to further my surprise they did not pay me for my labors~` All the hours of work , research and passion that went into this review and for what? Not one thin dime!
I read a book "The Professor and the Madman" which recounted the beginnings of this, the greatest of all dictionaries! The Madman was an American physician who was weaned on the civil war battle field and was never the same. He moved to England and spent his families allowance ( wealthy family ) on ladies that make you feel loved, it was told that he had a large appetite for these said women and a little friend to match, his little friends prodigious size was attributed to chronic masturbation. The Professor was a child of the streets with a gift for language but did not masturbate as much as the madman...Oh yea the madman cut off his XL special purpose with a small knife.I don't want to spoil the story so I will stop. Read the review I'm being redundant again.

18 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

Professor and the Madman OED, January 7, 2005

Reviewer:

Jonathan W. Williams (usa) - See all my reviews

I like the book because it comes with a really cool magnifying glass to read the tiny words,I purchased a supplemental magnifying glass to make the words even larger! My only suggestion would be that they print the book large enough to not require a magnifying glass perhaps 6' square? Sure it might be cumbersome but you would not need the magnifying glass, nevertheless I would still want the magnifying glass because its pretty cool on its own.

The following is all copied and pasted.

The Compact is not an abridgement, but a direct photoreduction of the entire 20-volume set, with nine pages of the original on every nine-by-twelve page of the Compact (a magnifying glass comes with it). As in the Second Edition, the Compact combines in one alphabetical sequence the sixteen volumes of the first OED and the four Supplements--plus an extra five thousand new words to bring this monumental dictionary completely up to date. And it is monumental, with definitions of 500,000 words, 290,000 main entries, 137,000 pronunciations, 249,300 etymologies, 577,000 cross-references, and over 2,412,000 illustrative quotations. But as large as it is, perhaps its most important feature is its historical focus. The OED records not only words and meanings currently in use but also those that have long been considered obsolete. Moreover, under each definition of a word is a chronologically arranged group of quotations that illustrate the word's usage down through the years, beginning with its earliest known appearance. The result is a dictionary that offers unique insight into the way our language has, over the centuries, grown, changed, and been put to use.

More than 100 years in the making, The Oxford English Dictionary is now universally acknowledged as the world's greatest dictionary--the supreme arbiter on the usage and meaning of English words, a fascinating guide to the history and evolution of the language, and one of the greatest works of scholarship ever produced. The Washington Post has written that "no one who reads or writes seriously can be without the OED." Now with the Compact, the world's greatest dictionary is within the reach of anyone who wants one.