The Meridian Hebrew/English English/Hebrew Dictionary

Instant, easy to use and precise, like it says on the cover. The only complaint I have, but it's true of many such dictionaries, is that the vowel point print is way too small.

I find that this dictionary is easy to use and the type is large enough to be seen easily. All vowels are clearly marked.

I'm a beginning Hebrew student--self-taught because of disabilities that prevent me from taking classes. This dictionary is a wonderul aid. One of the things I especially love is the transliteration. Hebrew words are transliterated into English letters, and English into Hebrew. The latter has been especially helpful for checking my pronunciation. Since I already know how the English words are pronounced I can use the transliteration to see if I've gotten all the sounds right. And, of course, I can use the Hebrew to English transliteration to check my pronunciation of the Hebrew words. It doesn't give much information about a word's various senses. But when I want that, I turn to the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament; Renn's expositional dictionary; Strong's Hebrew lexicon; or Briggs, Driver and Brown. But those are tomes and they don't cover nearly as many words as this dictionary. So the lack of such information is not a flaw, but simply the result of a trade-off. The result, in my opinion, is a lot of bang for the buck. All in all, I believe this book will be very useful to beginners as they learn the Hebrew alphabet and start building a vocabulary.

If you're looking for the one with the right balance of portability, comprehensiveness and clarity... this is it. I'm a second-year Hebrew student and this is by far my favorite inexpensive dictionary. If Klein's etymological dictionary would come back into print, and in a portable format, I would use it instead. Until then, this is my constant companion.

The current edition is identical to the Signet dictionary by Dov Ben Abba published in 1977, which is the one I'm using (it was only $1.95 then). Its definitions are very good, and are more extensive than in other pocket Hebrew dictionaries that I've seen, especially English-Hebrew. The Hebrew is fully vocalized so there's no question how to pronounce a word. Many Hebrew expressions are defined. My copy is getting so worn that I'm considering buying the new edition.