The Oxford Student's Dictionary is specially written for use in schools. It has many extra features and a layout that is clear and easy to use. The most distinctive feature of the dictionary is the special vocabulary of curriculum subjects. This includes many items not always found in dictionaries for adults: for example bioreactor, gene transfer, homozygote, plasmid, and synapse, all of which occur in science syllabuses.
Many new words in more general use have also been included: notably, the language of information technology (bulletin board, dot-com, e-commerce, virtual reality, WAP, and others). The information on word origins (etymologies) extends to every root word, and gives historical background as well as dealing with the development of word forms: for example, the colourful stories behind words such as deadline, halibut, and trivial. to