Author: Samuel A. Tsur
Publisher: Elsevier Science, Inc.
Publication date: 1999
Price: $166
ISBN: 0-444-82904 Available from: Elsevier Science, Inc., P.O. Box 945, Madison Square Station, New York, NY 10160-0757
Languages: English (with some French, Italian, Spanish, and German references
Number of pages: 646
Number of entries: 20,000+

The simple act of opening Samuel Tsur’s dictionary is sufficient to rekindle old irritations caused by the similarly formatted De Sola’s Abbreviation Dictionary, published by Elsevier in 1974. How can anyone put abbreviation after abbreviation in running columns, separated by semicolons, often with one acronym taking up half a page or more?

At times, the text becomes a visual blur, a thick diacritic underbrush interspersed with copses of uppercase letters, hopelessly competing for a placeholder’s role the eye cannot confer. Worse, no attempts seem to have been made to differentiate between entries, nor between entries and comments or cross-references. The richer the headword, the harder it is to read. Thus, the transmittal of relevant information is hindered and the author’s honest hard work obscured.

To be fair, there are clear objective limits. Already Tsur’s 20,000 lemmata fill 636 pages (and only because Elsevier uses such exquisite fonts and paper), skirting the portability limit. Furthermore, organizing such a vast amount of material otherwise could visually saturate the page beyond endurance or increase some production factors beyond affordability. Nevertheless, I do lament the lack of better solutions, because the format detracts from the real value of the work.

Its very size is staggering. To better demonstrate this, let me introduce my benchmarks^(*):

1. Davis, Neil M. Medical Abbreviations. Hungtingdon Valley (1143 Wright Drive, PA 19006): Neil M. Davis Associates, 1987/III. $5.95.
2. Farina, Angelo. Dizionario delle Sigle Mediche. Italian-English*. Milan: R. Cortina Ed., 1984. Lit 25.000.
3. Fuller Delong, Marilyn. Medical Acronyms & Abbreviations. Oradel (New Jersey 07649): Medical Economics Books, 1989/II. No price.
4. Lucchesi, Mario. Dizionario delle Sigle Mediche. English-Italian*. Milan: R. Cortina Ed., 1994. Lit. 45.000.
5. Touati, Maurice Alain. Dictionnaire International des Abbréviations Médicales. Paris: Maison du Dictionnaire, 1994. FF 290.

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* The listed prices were current at the time of purchase and do not reflect actual sticker values.

A superb Internet site is www.acronymfinder.com, with some 236,000+ definitions. Due to its collective and ephemeral nature, it cannot be used for benchmarking purposes. Nevertheless, it is often an invaluable aid to translation.

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A quick survey shows that Davis has 4,200 headwords; Farina, 6,000+; Fuller Delong, 6,000+; and Lucchesi, 6,500+. The number of Touati’s headwords is unknown, but he offers about 28,000 definitions.

Still, size alone does not establish relevancy. To this effect, I’ll start with acronyms I encountered while translating, but did not find in Farina’s dictionary (i.e., my standard desk reference):

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1. Listed as actual neutrophil count.
2. Spelled as thylene oxide.

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From the standpoint of absolute and relative success rates, Tsur’s achievement is nothing less than impressive. Weighting the scores, he emerges as the only author to offer the right answer in 13 instances out of 49, or in 26.5% of the cases. My runners-up, Touati and Lucchesi, share this honor only 11% of the time; the first with 3 exclusive hits out of 27, and the second with 2 out of 18.

The title indicates that there is more to this dictionary than just acronyms. To discover the true extent of Samuel Tsur’s vast scholarship requires an act of will on the part of the reader, who has to overcome the feeling of perusing this phonebook-sized reference for the interesting stories it silently implies. The exercise is well worth the effort, because the text is peppered with notes, references, and explanations.

Remember our LAL above? Only after reading Tsur did I discover that the Limulus of Limulus amoebocyte lysate is not a Latvian gentleperson, but a horseshoe king crab. Conversely, Tsur reminds us that ESP-1 (see ESP, p. 200), erroneously considered the first human cancer virus, was named in 1982 after the researcher Elizabeth S. Priori (although the minimalist explanation "Elizabeth S. Priori [virus]" is not too forthcoming). LES also means Lawrence Experimental Station, but we will not find it in some remote corner of Québec province, because it is an agarculturing device.

This is nothing. Hundreds of chemical acronyms are named and defined in terms of composition and uses. There are tables of geological eras (p. 235); metabolic pathways of the transmitter amines (on p. 166, for whatever reason); numeration systems (under Symbols, on p. 559); elements (pp. 187-193) and atomic numbers (p. 634, under Z); an avalanche of graphic symbols more than 10 pages long; the street names of every drug ever mentioned by judicial and scientific literature; six columns of acronyms used in respiratory testing (under PTF, on pp. 456-459) and two of kidney function tests (pp. 328-329); seven pages of hormones (pp. 267-274) and five of vitamins (pp. 611-615); every immunoglobulin under the sun (p. 296); countless prefixes and suffixes (almost two pages are dedicated to phobias alone under the prefix phob-, including the intractable phobophobia¾ the fear of one’s fears); not to mention every scientific journal and committee of professional association I know (short of ATA and DRC, its Dictionary Review Committee).

This aspect of Tsur’s work is probably the most difficult to evaluate. Every entry I saw was accurate and complete, but short of reading every page, it’s impossible to know the real extent of the récueil. The tables are not indexed and, instead of appearing in an appendix, are dispersed according to a semistringent alphabetic order, sometimes starting with obscure headwords, the meaning of which the reader must know in advance while looking for their definitions. For instance, the description kindly provided by Janet Kershaw of Elsevier’s Book Review Department mentions a listing of serological tests for syphilis. I uselessly looked under syphil- (there is no such prefix), VDRL (Venereal Disease Research Laboratory, present without references), WR (Wasserman Reaction, absent), or Lues (I, II, and III are listed, again without references). I finally struck gold searching for TPI (Treponema pallidum immobilization) and FTA (fluorescent treponemal antibody). Both refer to the headword STS, or serological test(s). Without knowing the existence of such a beast and its principal denouements, I would not have found one-and-a-half solid columns of data on page 550, including WR, Was, Wass, and any other acronym on the subject.

The material presented is various and complex and most resistant to simple organization. For instance, I did marvel at the ingenuity shown by a table entitled "Ten," found on page 572. It lists Latin prefixes and U.S. and British names of the positive and negative powers of 10. It is wonderful. I had never heard of a vigintillion (10⁶³ in the U.S. and 10¹²⁰ in the U.K.] before, but to finally discover it was a matter of sheer luck.

Luck is also required elsewhere. Greek letters do not appear at the beginning or end of their Latin equivalent headings (a for alpha, etc.), as is customary, nor under the generic title Greek alphabet, but within the alphabetical list of their English names in two unindexed tables. For example, theta appears at least in four places: in a table on page 557 under the subheading "4. Greek Alphabet" of the entry Symbols; on page 559, within the table "6. Numeration" of the same entry; and on page 575, as the lowercase θ and the uppercase Θ, between therap- and ther ex [therapeutic exercise].

The problem of indexing foreign characters and graphic symbols is not new nor is it easily solved. In the mid-1960s, the Odyssey Press of New York valiantly tried to address it in its unsurpassed Odyssey Technical Dictionaries and Encyclopedias, a 12 volume series edited by Polon, Reich, Witty, and Butterly. I know well the 740 pages of the DEA, or Dictionary of Electronics Abbreviations¾ Signs and Symbols. I did not particularly want to, but to search for the meaning of an unknown wingding often meant to start from page 629 and continue until page 740, only to discover that what I was looking for was in one of the 70 pages of symbols presented by the DCCSA (Dictionary of Computer and Control Systems ¾ Abbreviations, Signs and Symbols).

Mercifully, Tsur forces us to search through only 20 columns of symbols. Nevertheless, pray tell me why the Δ (delta) of Change, finite difference, or increment is listed after the π (pi of 3.14... fame) on page 555; and on page 556, once with the same meaning on the left column before the abbreviation D (of differential coefficient), and again on the right column under the variant Δt after the triple apostrophe ''' of Line (1/12 inch)? Even π reappears with a slightly different description on page 556, this time after @ or at.

In conclusion, I believe that it is for exuberantly rich contents such as this that the computer was invented. The current price is not trivial, but would be better justified attaching or offering as an alternative a companion CD-ROM with the text and a simple search engine. McGraw-Hill, Oxford Press, Larousse, and many other prestigious publishers have appreciated the advantages of this arrangement. Perhaps Elsevier could rethink and better modulate its current CD-ROM policy as well.