Frances Lincoln ISBN 9781786038104 £17.99
There is a great emphasis on learning words as part of the curriculum, and particularly in extending vocabulary, so that there is not a constant use of terms such as ‘lovely’. The publication of the book “The Lost Words” by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris highlighted the way that we are actually losing word from our dictionaries, even though we are also gaining some very unusual new words. This new work looks at a wide range of unusual words; some of them are long and rarely used, whilst others are found more frequently in common usage. The book gives us a brief explanation of different parts of speech and how we can use endings to guess at the meaning. I also like the section about how to read the book; basically we read it in any way that we want to, which is really great for young readers in particular. Each letter of the alphabet is given four pages; the first page shows the letter of the alphabet followed by two pages of definitions and finally a whole page devoted to one really interesting word. This is a large book, being 265mm x 320mm in size and the illustrations fill the pages with bright and vivid images. It is particularly good for just dipping in to, but it also encourages young people from 7+ to look at the strange world of our written language and see how things are changing.
Margaret Pemberton