And I used those new words. Work an archaic Scots expression into conversation three times, they say, and it's yours for life.

I use that big book to this day, although it is much the worse for my having looked up just about all its words at one time or other, and for an otherwise lovely dog I owned 20 years ago, who had her way with the binding one day while I was at work.

In 1987 Random House issued a second edition, and in 1993 an update of that edition. This update is now offered in both book and CD-ROM form, created in collusion with WordPerfect Corp. You can buy both together for $159; the disk only for $79; the book only for $100.

Random House is under no illusions that the disk will replace the bound book version. You need a computer and CD-ROM drive to read this thing, and each time you use it requires a minute and a half of fumbling with the disk to boot it up.

On the other hand, the disk, weighing all of three ounces, won't rupture vital parts of you when you lug it around. It's just a cheap piece of plastic, so Random House can issue quick updates every couple of months, if it is so inclined. Being plastic, only the most perverse dog will target it for chewing.

Anyway, all Random House sent me was the disk. After using it for a month, I like it better and use it more than any other CD-ROM in my collection.

It's great just as a straightforward dictionary. It contains 315,000 entries. As the first unabridged dictionary in over 20 years, during a time of unprecedented language change, it includes new words like nannoplankton, aromatherapy, date rape and def that would have been nonsense back in 1967. New places like Moldova, Belarus, and Ogaden. New concepts like carjacking, yuppie flu, and ecotage. New people like Hojatolislam Rafsanjani, Vaclav Havel and Al Gore. New epithets like bimbette, couch potato, and wuss.

The definitions are deep and complete. They tell you if a word or phrase is slang, offensive, archaic or "eye dialect" (e.g., wimmin). The disk version doesn't contain the atlas, gazetteers, and foreign language dictionaries my original edition did. But it's lookup features more than compensate. Simply type in the word you're looking for, and it whisks you to that word. If your spelling is shaky, it shows you a list of possible correct spellings.

The program allows you to use wildcards (* and ?) so typing must* results in a long list including mustache, mustard, mustang and Mustafa. And it lets you look for anagrams -- angel, glean -- but don't expect to find a lot, because there aren't a lot.

Best of all, you can point the mouse at any word, anywhere in the text, click twice, and it will look that word up.

You can even use the dictionary inside-out -- give it a phrase that you want to see in a word's definition, and in a minute or two it have searched through its entire humongous text and find every entry that contains that phrase.

I asked it to find the phrase celestial objects, and it found a dozen of them, from astrophotography to syzygy.

Consider the entire entry for the household word syzygy:

syz-y-gy (siz,i jÄ) n., pl. -gies 1. Astron. an alignment of three celestial objects, as the sun, the earth, and either the moon or a planet: Syzygy in the sun-earth-moon system occurs at the time of full moon and new moon. 2. Class. Pros. a group or combination of two feet, sometimes restricted to a combination of two feet of different kinds. 3. any two related things, either alike or opposite. [1650-60; < LL syzygia < Gk syzygía union, pair, equiv. to syzyg ( os) yoked together ( sy- SY- + zyg-, base of zeugnynai to YOKE1 + -os adj. suffix) + -ia]_ sy•zyg•i•al (si zij,Ä ƒl) syz•y•get•ic (sizÉi jet,ik) syz•y•gal (siz,i gƒl) adj.

So which adjective form are you more likely to use -- syzygial, syzygetic, or syzygal? Do what you like, I'm sticking with syzygetic.

One of the ways in which the new edition excels is new technology words. Not only does it include hundreds of new words like teraflop, emoticon, trackball and jaggies, but it makes interesting etymological connections you might not have known. Did you know that the word glitch, meaning error, malfunction, or problem, comes from the Yiddish glitsch, meaning slippery area? The dictionary's chief editor, Sol Steinmetz, is an important Yiddish scholar.

There's so much power and flexibility in the program, and the dictionary itself is a joy. It's not often I can point to a book or software package that changed my life. But here I am, look at me, I'm pointing.

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