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If you need this book, you will not understand it. If you understand it, you don't need it! Unless you were the one student in thousands whose jaw dropped in rapt fascination when your seventh-grade teacher diagrammed the parts of speech, you will not follow the alleged explanations in this book. The explanations come straight out of that seventh-grade grammar text. Such and such a word is the intransitive past participle of another word. There, that cleared it up, didn't it! There is almost never a simple declarative sentence about how to use a confusing word... here is a lovely example from page 88... "The adjective precipitate and the adverb precipitately were once applied to physical steepness but are now used primarily of rash, headlong actions. Precipitous currently means "steep" in both literal and figuratrive senses: 'the precipitous rapids of the upper river; a precipitous drop in commodity prices.' But precipitous and precipitously are also frequently used to mean "abrupt, hasty," which takes tham into territory what would ordinarily belong to precipitate and precipitately..." Hope that cleared it up for you! This book suffers from "junior high math teacher's syndrome," where if you didn't understand the problem, and found the courage to raise your hand, the teacher just looked at you as if you'd just gotten off the special-ed bus and repeated exactly the same indecipherable explanation using the exact same words, only slightly slower and with more condescension. The writers of this book are dictionary editors, and therefore presume that telling us the part of speech and Greek or Latin derivation will make things clear. They do not. I write for a living, in part. I do not think I found one confusing word clarified by this book in a way I will incorporate in my work.