Word Menu 2.2 review:2 stars (Over-rated product) - Word Menu 2.2 offers quickly accessible words, however the defintions are vague and indirect. Many words you would expect to find are missing, and frankly this is a program that would be most useful for people learning the english language,seeking to understand genres which certain words pertain to. It is my opinion that most english speakers already have a strong grasp on most of these words and subjects they entail; buying this for any trivial benefit of searching words by subjects, is foolhardy. It's not worth 30 dollars, I wish I would not have purchased it and do not reccomend it. If the price was 15 dollars or less, I would suggest "hey why not". $30 is an unreasonable price for this simplistic vocabulary lexicon and is more wisely spent on something else.4 stars (Good idea, needing attention to basic details.) - This is a very comprehensive resource of categorised words and their meanings, which is easily navigated and understood. Loaded onto a laptop, one has a lot of power easily to hand.

The Fractal Browser looks like a good idea and would be a visually attractive feature for school kids. But I would have been happy to ditch this feature in place of having a standard dictionary browsing option outside of the categorised options, and still retain links to the corresponding categories. Another aspect of the Fractal Browser is that the links are images with quite fine text. This doesn't respond to the browser `Text Size' selector in Explorer. So monitors set at higher resolutions than 800 x 600 will be problematic for users with less than good eyesight. Users of IBM Thinkpads will not be able to get around this. This is also a problem with respect to the category tree.

(P.S. 22/09/2004: IBM Thinkpad users can get around this problem by right clicking on their desktop, and then left clicking on the Appearance tab, and selecting one of the Windows, Scheme options with larger GUI attributes. This however, may clash with other applications, which need a higher than 800x 600 resolution to allow the use of some of their property sheets/dialog boxes. Many recent applications are now optimised for 1024 x 768 and higher.)


A good product in principle and at a very reasonable price, but falls a little bit short in the overall design, with too much attention to the deluxe features, I think.

Searching for words is straightforward and the history feature is useful, but if you aren't sure of a word's spelling it can be tedious to find it, by trial and error, unless you know its category and go manually browsing for it. Google smarts would be useful here, and worth a few dollars more.5 stars (Five stars!!!! BUT...) - It's amazing! A real partner if you like the sound and taste of the words and definitions; The Fractal Browser help to see the word in its context, that is just one the top features. Writers, screenwriters, language lovers, scholars, will love it. BUT... the software has a bug when you install it in the Spanish Versions of Windows XP and Windows NT: The Split Results View doesn't appears.
Word Menu 2.2 Features:
Reports (Reporting)
Form
Computer software (programs)
Word Processing (Processor)
Text Editors
Spell Checkers (Spelling Check)
wordprocessing (wordprocessors)
Reference
Encyclopedia (Encyclopedias)
Dictionary (Dictionaries)
Education (Educational)
Writing (Literature
CD
Automatic Web updating of the Word Menu database
Reverse Dictionary - find words by meaning or by looking up related words
Glossary Treasury with nearly 800 divisions and 80,000 entries
Almanac with entries for holidays, sports terms, science and more
Helps arrange your words in a logical, categorized structure

Word Menu 2.2 is the CD-ROM version. The full version can be purchased by clicking on the "CLICK HERE TO ORDER" button below for around 34.99USD.