Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (17th edition)

This journal's editor must have chuckled when he sent me this book to review. He is doubtless aware how critical I am, angry even, of the indiscriminate use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). This middleweight dictionary of some 80,000 terms contains little else but the IPA! Not that I object to the use of IPA for heavyweight and specialist pronunciation dictionaries of course, but too many middle‐range and concise dictionaries clutter their pages with its typographical spaghetti. Far from enhancing their products, as I suspect publishers think, the use of the IPA can detract from a dictionary's value since...