I have this little electronic dictionary program that I've had on my PC since about 1993. It's 8MB and would fit on the tiny hard drives of the day and on even smaller notebook hard drives.

It's the Random House Webster's Electronic Dictionary and Thesaurus College Edition Version 1.0, Copyright 1992 by Reference Software International. It was designed for Windows 3.1, sports a simple interface, and it's small and fast. It’s been an indispensable tool for this product of the Tennessee public education system.

Every time I replaced a PC, it was one of the first things I copied over to the new one. You just copy the folder, no installation, no registry entries, no drama. It has run faithfully on Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP.

Every time I moved it to a new PC I checked to see if there was a newer version, but they had quit publishing it and all the electronic dictionaries had gone to a CD format which seemed like an inconvenience to me. I’ve tried some of the various online dictionaries, and just didn’t like them. Plus, you’re not always online.

My latest replacement PC has Vista so I figured I'd be pressing my luck trying to run it, plus it's getting a little outdated. (It doesn't have an entry for "internet" or "cell phone" or "DVD" or "PDA.") It also appears to have a memory or resource leak that didn't manifest itself until I got on XP and could actually run my PC for weeks at a time without rebooting.

So I went looking around and found the Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary with Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Thesaurus. It cost a whole $20 and I downloaded it from Innovative Knowledge, which offers a free trial. I’m sure it’s available in the stores, too.

It’s a huge download, and once installed it takes up a whopping 750MB on your hard drive -- nearly ten times larger than my trusty old Random House electronic dictionary. But with 500GB hard drives being fairly routine, that’s no big deal. It has a nice, up to date user interface and some new features such as bookmarks and spelling help. It also has audio pronunciations, which turn out to be a nice feature. And it has an entry for "internet."

(It also lists "google" as a transitive verb not requiring capitalization that means "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the World Wide Web." But sadly it’s already out of date. "Twitter" means "to utter successive chirping noises." Oh, wait...)

Anyway, I sort of miss my reliable old Random House friend and companion, but this new one is working out nicely. And it's pretty fast on a quad-core Pentium.

One final note. If you go looking for it online or in the stores, be sure you get the "collegiate" version. There is another version with about one-third the number of definitions and no audio pronunciations, and it's priced the same at $20.