One weekend when the family was in a bookstore looking for new books for our two year old son, we noticed him browsing through dictionaries. I wasn’t planning to buy him a dictionary yet because I felt he was too young for it, but as I observed him closely, he seemed to be very interested, so I checked the different kinds of children’s dictionaries available and found the Children’s Illustrated Dictionary. 

I chose it over the many other children’s dictionaries I saw at the bookstore primarily because it included illustrations and pictures for all the words, unlike the others. It has over 1,300 illustrated entries with simple definitions that young children can easily understand. There is also a sample sentence to help explain the word better. Beside the headword or the word being defined is a part of speech telling the reader if the headword is a noun, an adjective, an adverb or verb.

Another thing that I liked about it is that it’s very colorful, and there’s a colored border on the right side of every page for every letter of the alphabet (example.g., all the pages with words starting with the letter A have violet borders, all pages with the letter B have green border, and so on). On that colored border also, the letters of the alphabet are arranged vertically and the featured letter is encircled for ease of use.

Moreover, the pages are not crowded. At the top of the first page, there’s a big font of the featured letter and illustrations of a few popular words that start with that letter (like alligator, apple and an airplane for the letter A). Each page has a maximum of only 6 words with their respective illustrations, definitions and sample sentences. Although our little boy could only read a few words when we first bought it, he enjoyed browsing through it. He liked looking at the illustrations and would ask me to read with him. We would even spell out some of the words, which helped him become more familiar with the different words and their spellings.