Merriam Webster Medical Desk Dictionary Description:

Merriam Webster Medical Desk Dictionary review:
2 stars (Poorly designed screen functions) - Although this dictionary's contents are extensive, the screen functions are relics from the DOS era. They are laborious and clumsy. To find a word for difinition, it has to be spelled perfectly, there's no list of proximations to the word entered. Changing a word selection is also clumsy especially in the thesaurus when the cursor doesn't show up in the entry slot. If someone knows of a better software, I'd sure like to hear cause this thing sucks!! Maria McGowan
2 stars (Good basic reference, lousy interface.) - The definitions and thesaurus cross referencing are very good. The user interface is quite honestly shameful. Software companies got away with this years ago, but there are now accepted standards for windows user interfaces (e.g keyboard short cuts are missing). Integration with Word 2003 is weak. Numerous bugs and exceptions and very slow.
5 stars (Great product with a lot of features) - I had an old version of this software (2.0, I think), which requires Mac OS 9 or classic. This new version runs in native OS X. I agree with other reviewers: the interface is ugly, but it does the job. I like the audio capability. English is not my first language so I find the pronunciation feature indispensable (don't forget to install it; it's not included in the "easy" install option). Another great feature is the "Defining text contains" search. You can find a word by entering the words that are in the definition. What is the word that denotes the noise a duck makes? You can easily find that, of course, ducks "quack," not to mention that you will also find all kinds of ducks -- the blue-winged teal, the bufflehead, the eider -- and all sorts of duck relatives and even duck dishes. You can also find words that rhyme with duck: cluck, guck and many more. Other ways of searching include usage paragraph contains, forms a crossword, homophones, cryptograms and more. I don't understand why these features are not prominently used to market the dictionary. They are one the reasons for using a dictionary in a computer, and they make the $20 a joke. I would pay so much more for it.