This is an old-style dictionary, organized according to roots rather than alphabetically. That's fine though. What's not fine is that it is missing soooooo many common current words. This dictionary is ancient. It's word list is WWI vintage. ...

As a dictionary this may be useful to someone who already knows Arabic, but it will be difficult for a beginning or intermediate student of Arabic. Abreviations for parts of speech are given for English but not for Arabic. Going from English to Arabic, the exact sense of a word is not given so you can't really be certain what you might be saying. Pick an English word and you get two or three Arabic words. Look those up and (if you can find them) you get somewhat different English words. You won't find a single 'naughty bit' either.

Moreover, it is UK English (you can find a biscuit but you'll get no cookies here) which results in some curious word choices. For example, some English definitions for Arabic words are: "calumniator, feccundation, state of orphanage, eructation, reproach for benefit, jet d'eau, to drill child, aided conqueror, patch scrap, silk stuff, to spell award, etc." You may need another dictionary just to understand these definitions.

It is definitely not for a beginner and the intermediate student will need a fairly good grasp of Arabic.

The dictionary includes a wide selection of words a student is likely to use.The arabic-english part folows the standard arabic word order using the origin base of words, which is not given explicitly. Also the gender of nouns is not given and there is no guide or grammar in the beginning. I recommend it since it is the only bi-directional dictionary.

If you would like lots of great pictures of many canaries of color and type varieties, you may enjoy this book despite its sometime misidentification of the birds in the captions. I have noted that the quality of the text published by TFH in recent years varies widely. Some of it now seems to suffer due to poor editing and author error. This is especially true of THE PROPER CARE OF... series. For more sophisticated and more accurate text try some of their older selections like: CANARIES AND RELATED BIRDS-- Horst Bielfeld or ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CANARIES-- G.T. Dodwell. The information in these older books may lack the latest trends in aviculture, but these trends aren't covered in the present book either!

As a member of the Kiowa Tribe I am aware of the fact that this book was published without the imput of the Kiowa Tribe or any of its leaders. Our tribal leaders reviewed the manuscript and made the proper corrections, but never submitted the corrections to the publisher therefore, this book went into publication full of errors about the Kiowa Tribe. I have read the published copy and the errors which should have been corrected are still shown in the finished book. I feel this book is not a good research source

This dictionary is barely adequate for the beginning Arabic speaker. It is difficult to find useful words and the typeface is definitely not easy to read. If you need a working-level dictionary, spring for the extra bucks and get the Oxford version.