The Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus provides a definitive reference of words in the English language in an easy-to-use electronic format. With a simple layout and excellent results, this is the king of electronic dictionaries.

The program is delightfully simple to navigate, with an intuitive layout and highly readable results. We never considered looking for the Help file because everything is so crystal clear, which is a good thing in a reference work. You can scroll through an alphabetical list of the entire dictionary or simply type in a word to call up a definition. If you misspell a word, the program will display all similar spellings so that you can scroll through them and see how close you were. The definitions are exactly like what you’d find in a paper dictionary, but the program’s ultrafast search results beat looking up words the old-fashioned way, hands down.

There’s also a great thesaurus feature that provides lists of words with similar meanings to whatever word you choose. This program was a treat to operate.