This is not a dictionary of academic terms you might have been expected to learn in school. Nor is it a dictionary directed to travelers in foreign lands from which you are supposed to learn scores of terms about ordering your dinner in restaurants, or learning to get about in a train station, or arguing with concierges about the state of your hotel room or the high amount of your bill. It is, rather, a dictionary to help you elucidate what you come across every day in newspapers or hear on television. Its choice of terms and directness of style reflect the immediacy of everyday discourse. Thus it is a unique and exceptionally useful addition to the genre of special dictionaries. What are its other features? First, it guides you to the correct pronunciation of foreign words, using transcriptions from ordinary English. Most other dictionaries of foreign words and expressions use elaborate phonetic symbols unfathomable to most persons, or, even worse, have no pronunciation guides at all. Second, the definitions are a model of clarity, and the meanings are illustrated by hundreds of sentences.