How does one review a dictionary? If the aim is to arrive at a reasoned and mature assessment of the book the ideal way would be to keep it on my shelf for five years or so, noting how often I find it useful to consult it, how often I am happy with the result of the consultation, and how often I am unhappy. Unfortunately, however, the job needs to be done more quickly than that, so I shall adopt a more superficial approach, checking a selection of definitions to see how accurate and helpful they are.



Opening the book at random led the definition of "elasticity coefficient". The definition given is accurate enough as far as it goes (setting aside the presence of two undefined quantities in the equation given), but I wonder how much illuminated a reader will be who consults the dictionary in the hope of understanding the (important) difference between an elasticity coefficient and a control coefficient. The definition fails to mention that elasticity coefficients are usually called just elasticities, and it fails to give a cross-reference to "control coefficient" (perhaps just as well, as the dictionary has no entry for control coefficient), but it does give a rather unhelpful suggestion to "see controllability coefficient" --- unhelpful because following the suggestion leads only to the information that this is a "former name for elasticity coefficient". Would it not save the reader trouble just to include this information in the main entry?



What about something that I knew nothing at all about before, such as myocilin? This is apparently also called TIGR, which was news to me as I thought TIGR was The Institute for Genome Research, and that is also what the entry for TIGR says, without any cross-reference to myocilin. Anyway, myocilin is a protein of no known function expressed in many tissues---not especially muscle, despite the entry a few lines up that says that myo+ is a prefix denoting muscle. Is this important enough to justify a five-line definition? Apparently it is, because the gene for myocilin is implicated in glaucoma.



As an illustration of the maxim that one picture is worth a thousand words, the definition of "Fischer projection" runs to more than 150 words, but lacks the simple diagram that would have rendered the words more readily intelligible.



A common fault in elementary biochemistry textbooks is the lack of understanding that some authors display of the ionic states of biochemical species in neutral aqueous solution. This is now far better than it was a generation ago, but there are still some authors who have not yet seen the light. So how well does the dictionary fare? Less well than I would have hoped. Phosphoric acid derivatives are normally shown in ionized states, but carboxylic acids and primary amines do less well: threonine, thyronine, thyroxine, tranexic acid, tryptophan and tyrosine all appear in physically impossible states in the space of a few pages.



All this led me to consult the entry on "zwitterion", which defines it as "an alternative name for dipolar ion". This seemed to be an example of defining the familiar in terms of something less familiar, but I see that several textbooks do prefer the latter term. Anyway, a dipolar ion or zwitterion is "a molecule containing ionic groups of opposite charge in equal numbers". So the form of aspartate that exists in neutral solution is not a zwitterion? If we want a word that includes all the common amino acids at pH 7 we need amphion (or amphoion if we prefer it and can think of a way to pronounce it), a term that I have never encountered (in either spelling) in any paper I have seen in the biochemical literature. Anyway, it would have been nice to see more expansive definitions of these terms, and it would be hard to argue that there was no space available in a dictionary that has room for nine lines to discuss the pronunciation of Linux. It is dangerous, anyway, for a biochemistry dictionary to include terms from computing that are in danger of becoming obsolete before the ink is dry: Netscape, for example, is "a popular browser available for a variety of computers and operating systems", but this is 2006, and who uses Netscape Navigator in 2006? Have young biochemists even heard of it? Incidentally, despite the bold type there is no entry for browser.



If any of the editors read this review they will doubtless find it very pedantic. I have to plead guilty to that, but reviewers of dictionaries need to be pedantic, and in an ideal world compilers of dictionaries would be pedantic as well.