Franklin Merriam Webster Advanced Dictionary and Thesaurus with Spell Correction (MWD-1500)

The Franklin Merriam-Webster spell checker is even better than I expected it to be. Along with the dictionary and thesaurus, there is also a punctuation & style guide, both a biographical and geographical dictionary, and a five language translatior. Pretty impressive. There are also spelling games though they are not intuitively easy to play. The instruction manual is well writen and easy to follow. The only flaw is that the LED readout is dark and I often have to change the angle to see the screen clearly.

This device is great for any grade level up to college. I use it nearly every day, and it is worth every penny.When I first opened and started using this item, the room was not very well lit and the words on the device were difficult to read. However, this was easily corrected by turning the contrast up.Games include hangman, anagrams, word train, word builder, jumble, connect four, and tic tac toe, each of which you can put in your own word if desired. Word builder is very useful for games like scrabble; you can put in a bunch of letters and it gives you all of the different words possible to be made with them.There are three choices for phont size: small medium and large. They have 10, 8, and 5 lines in a screen respectivly, however, size small is written in all caps.Scrolling is simple, you can either press down to scroll one line at a time, or you can press space, which scrolls an entire page making the last line first.The buttons are fairly easy to press after trying it for the first time for a minute or two; it does not usually press undesired keysThe first set of batteries that the device came with lasted about four months, but I use it a ton.So far it has been very durable and usefull; I use it nearly every day when writing papers. On my last model (1440, out of print), its top broke off after a couple weeks.Dictionary & Thesaurus: The dictionary is very easy to use, has had every word I have looked up (mostly college level words(, and it is very easy to look up a word inside a definition that you may not be familiar with. Switching to and from dictionary and thesaurus is not at all complicated; it can be done with the press of a button. Dictionary definitions are good and easy to understand. Thesaurus entries are filled with several synonyms, ranging from three to over twenty.Punctuation & Style: Being a higher level student, I did not really use this feature very much, but there are 9 different categories to choose from on the first menu, and around five different options on each category once selected (i.e. choice of Punctuation, Capitals and Italics, Abbreviations, etc. Select Capitals and Italics. Choose from Introduction, Beginnings, Proper Nouns and Adjectives, etc.Geographical Dictionary: This feature can be useful even if you think you'll never use it. It literally has thousands of entries in the A's alone (I scrolled down just out of curriosity). It even had my own city, now with a population of 80,000, however, its information must have been written around '03 or '04 because it said it only had 50,000. This feature is helpful even if you are just wondering what country or state a certain city is in. Definitions are very brief, usually less than three lines long.Biographical Dictionary: At first, it was difficult to figure out how to look at other entries of people with the same name, but I simply went to the help menu, and it explained it to me. Its selection, I'm pretty sure, is close to the size of the geographical.5 Language Translator: English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian are the different languages to choose from. You can have words translated to and from any of these languages. When the word is typed in (after auto correction), it gives the translation for each language. This feature is nice if you happen to read a sign in a different language and are currious about its meaning.It also has a calculator, currency converter, clock, date, time etc., and conversions to and from metric and U.S. It also has a place to put contact information of friends (up to 50) which holds their name, number, and address.Learn a Word: this feature randomly selects a word from the dictionary each time you turn on the device. This can be turnded off if desired.I would have given this product 5 stars if it was expandable.I would (and have) reccommended this product to a friend.

I purchased the dictionary because I love to play scrabble on my iPad against the CPU. I was going to use the dictionary when the game presented a word I did not know, but the dictionary does not have a huge percentage of words. The actual scrabble game uses the Miriam Webster dictionary, so I assumed the product would be ideal. Boy, was I wrong. In case anyone might think that the scrabble game uses a different dictionary than the one credited, it matches the Miriam Webster dictionary at my bedside, with the exception of new words. The electronic dictionary product simply displays CORRECTION LIST, which is not helpful, and is very frustrating. The manufacturer should be embarrassed, tarred and feathered, and finally drawn and quartered.

Stopped working after only 2 months and, surprise!, return had to done within 1 month!Screwed

I absolutely love this electronic dictionary and more. It not only has a great dictionary, but also the thesaurus is very handy for me. As a writer I have to express the same meaning, but not use the same word all the time. The thesaurus has been extremely useful in that capacity. The portability of it means I can be reading or writing something anywhere and the words I need are right at my fingertips. I have not even used all of the functions yet. I would highly recommend this product to anyone that wants to polish up there vocabulary or build a better one.

Franklin MWD-1500 is a nice product.Very good feature, it has most of the words you might look for.I had MWD-480 in past; this one is lot faster than that.Size is also pretty handy.It has five language dictionary which has basic words that you may look for.Games are OK. not very interesting.One option i like most is you can add words to your words list that you may feel are whether important to you or difficult for you. You can review them again and again. Thats a very useful feature.Product feel is also very great. Keyboard however is not sufficiently sensitive, you may have to press few buttons HARDER to type. Trust me this is sometimes annoying. (But this was the same problem with my old MWD-480 too).The display is not at all as crisp as they show on the product information photos.It is pixeleted so first time i saw the product i thought there is something wrong with it but it was ok.I think the consumer has a right to see the actual photo not a graphically edited one.I had to buy this new one cause my old one's (MWD-480)display went blank just after the one year warranty was over.Thats why they cant do anything to it.If this one does the same i will not buy one more again and produce more landfills.Overall happy with the product so far.

3 days after I had it i could not live with out it. I am a college student and with the classes I take I come across some words that I think are made up just to make it harder and before I would have to ask someone or just pass it now I am able to search for the word. Now the negative, there have been some words that I could not find. These words were important to me so it was bad. Maybe another dictionary would of had them but it's only been a few words so far overall I have used it almost every day the botton did get stuck one time so look out for that.