Printed Hardback Hebrew Dictionary
This series of web pages provides free lessons about the different types of Hebrew Dictionary.
Home | Learning Hebrew | Hebrew Dictionary | Printed Hardback Hebrew Dictionary
In the lesson
What Types Of Hebrew Dictionary Are There? we saw that buying a traditional Printed Hardback
Hebrew Dictionary is one possibility. This is the option that many people will automatically think of when they decide to buy a Hebrew Dictionary.
A printed Hardback Hebrew Dictionary has the following important advantages:
- They are robust, long lasting and easy to use.
- Unlike software, a Printed Hardback Hebrew Dictionary will take years before it really becomes out of date. By contrast, software needs to be updated regularly, and you have to keep buying batteries for an Electronic Hebrew Dictionary.
- A good quality Hebrew Dictionary in printed hardback format is likely to be an ultimate source of reference for any word you want to find in Hebrew.
However, a Printed Hardback Hebrew Dictionary also has the following important disadvantages:
- They can be very large and heavy to carry around. Carrying one between different locations may simply not be practical.
- Due to practical size limitations, a printed Hebrew Dictionary typically lists words only in their common or root form. Since Hebrew words have prefixes and suffixes depending on their form, you need to look up the root in a Hebrew Dictionary. This is fine if you know what the root of the Hebrew word is, but if you are new to Hebrew and do not know Hebrew grammar well, this can be a problem. By contrast, an Electronic Hebrew Dictionary or Software Hebrew Dictionary will generally contain all possible parsings of every Hebrew word.
- You may find that a printed Hebrew Dictionary contains hundreds, or even thousands of pages. Finding a single word within those pages can take quite a while. If you have a lot of words to look up, such as reading a Hebrew newspaper, it could be a very slow process.