Great Reference

I wanted an electronic dictionary for my 9 year old Daughter. She reads a lot and keeps coming across words she doesn’t know. and taking a big dictionary to bed is not really the solution.

So I decided to get her an electronic dictionary.

It had to have more than a couple of lines on the screen to make the definitions easy to read.
It had to have a very comprehensive dictionary and thesaurus

This sort of narrowed it down to the Franklin MW 1850, the Sharp PW-E500 and the Seiko ER-8000.

However it also had to have games. my daughter insisted and they would hopefully encourage her to learn new words, which got rid of the sharp.

Also I also wanted something more English(UK) orientated, which sort of got rid of the Franklin (although I could be wrong on that).

The Seiko ER-8000 has less words than the Sharp PW-E500, but so far has had all the words I’ve looked for, including McGuffin, Phylogenic and bloviate

The screen has 3 zoom settings and is very clear to read (no backlight though).
Also when you switch it on it shows the last thing you were looking at.


The dictionary definitions are quite detailed, and although the dictionary doesn’t have word usage the thesaurus may. It also has a pronunciation key but only on some of the words.
The Seiko shows a list of all the words possible based on the letters you’ve so far typed. So if you press ‘a’ you get all the words that start with ‘a’, and if you then press ‘b’ you get all the words that start ‘ab’. It also allows wildcards so if you type *bat you get all the words that end in bat. and its pretty fast at doing this.
You can then press down and select the word you want.

The Seiko doesn’t automatically store a list of the words you look up, however its easy to add any words you want to the ‘easy learn list’. This stores up to 100 words.
One pain however is that it doesn’t always pick up on multiple word dictionary entries, ie you cant select ‘a cappella’ and add it to the word list.. a bug I think..

Its easy to jump between the dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopaedia just by selected the word and pressing enter. You can create a chain with jumping of about 10 words.

Also in the thesaurus if the word you want isn’t a ‘headword’ you can easily search the synonyms to find a ‘headword’ that contains the given synonym. As mentioned before the thesaurus shows the usage of a lot of its words which is very useful in working out a suitable alternative.


The encyclopaedia has quite a lot of content.. pity about no pictures though
And all nicely cross reference… if you find a word you don’t know in the encyclopaedia then just highlight it and jump to the dictionary definition, then press back once you have read it.

The encyclopaedia is also pretty impressive, pity no pictures or diagrams though. I’ve been comparing it to a ‘paper’ ‘Webster’s encyclopaedia’ I found lying around. It has 17000 articles, the Britannica 25000. The depth for both is about the same. It can also be searched by headword and category and is also quite fast.. even the article search.


I feel it could have had more categories though. There no easy way to say get a list of all the dogs it has articles on. You can do an article search, but what would have been really nice would have been some sort of hierarchal lookup.. ie start at animals, then be able to select pets etc…

The games are pretty basic, but have managed to keep my daughter occupied and it allows you to use your word list in the games.


Anyway bottom line, I think this is a great reference tool (how do they fit so may words into something so small), and seeing as you can get it for about the same price as the sharp (if you shop around.. I got mine for < £80 including p&p from oxford educational supplies.. Special offers, which can be tricky to find, but I’ve seen it for £85 including p&p elsewhere, so look around), I’d highly recommend it, even if you don’t need the games.