This is the third extended and improved edition of the dictionary. Previous editions having been confined mainly to English and German, this is, with the addition of French, the first trilingual edition. The number of terms has been expanded from 20 000 to 30 000.

A partial thesaurus structure is provided in the form of broader terms, narrower terms, related terms, synonyms, antonyms and brief definitions, where appropriate. As before, there is a separate list of scientific names (of Latin origin), together with linguistic equivalents.