Thorndike-Barnhart Young Student's Dictionary

Thanks very much to those of you who wrote detailed reviews about this dictionary. It made my decision easy, and I have been very pleased.

I bought this for my 9 year old daughter. She actually enjoys using it. It has a few pictures, but also has a lot of entries in it. I like using it myself. The definitions are easy to understand. I have two younger children so I think this dictionary will get a lot of use.

I wanted to get a more advanced dictionary for my 3rd grade son since the current Children's Dictionary he has often did not contain words we looked up. At first my Children's Dictionary search did not bring me to this book. But I read a review which recommended this dictionary. It was by a 5th Grade Teacher (Shannon Bradford), who also has her review here. I did my own comparisons of about 4 different dictionaries I found in my search. Using just the online reviews and descriptions, I decided to go with this one. When I received it, I was SO PLEASED! The book is so interesting. The beautiful color pictures and overall layout makes it interesting and fun to lookup words. Just flipping through it makes you want to stop and look at the pictures. I would have paid twice what I did for it. ...

I'm a 5th grade teacher. I've used and compared many different dicitonaries. The Thorndike-Barnhart Junior Dictionary is the best by far that I've ever seen. Recently I decided to buy dictionaries for my class. I looked at over 20 different student dictionaries. Some of the dictionaries I looked at were Merriam-Webster Children's Dictionary, MacMillan Dictionary for Students, American Heritage Student Dictionary, and Scholastic Children's Dictionary. None of these held a candle to the Thorndike-Barnhart Junior Dictionary. I took a list of over 200 words that my students couldn't find in our current dictionaries and I looked them up in each of the dictionaries I compared. There were two things I was looking for. First, I wanted to know which dictionary had most of these words. Second I wanted to know which dictionary struck the best balance defining the words in such a way that my students could understand them without loosing meaning or using langage that was too difficult for my students to understand. The Thorndike-Barnhart Junior Dictionary was the best in both categories by far.There is also a Thorndike-Barnhart Intermediate Dictionary. It has the same words and definitions as this dictionary but also includes a bunch of extras (maps, lists, and such) but costs almost twice as much. If yo've got the money to spend, it might be worth it, but the price seemed high to me for what additional information it offered.