The book is very comprehensive and will be an excellent source to consult when completing crosswords. It will be extremely useful.I bought the 1977 4th edition some time in the 1980s and it has been may favourite thesaurus ever since. The main reason for buying this one is the need in my current work to have reference books in two different workplaces.How American is it? As an example, 746 (American) FOOTBALL gets two full pages, but 752 SOCCER only gets half a page. So there's some bias. But I don't often look at a thesaurus to discover alternatives to "offside rule" or "fumble". I'm much more likely to want to know what a word like "absolute" can mean - and for that job, this thesaurus is admirable. In some areas, the bias seems absent - in the list of anniversaries and holidays in 487 CELEBRATION, we get Remembrance Day as well as Veterans' Day for example, and Queen's birthday as well as Lincoln's birthday. On the other hand, the list of vegetables in 310 PLANTS has "rutabaga" and not "swede".For me, a thesaurus must be the index type like this one, as it's a far more efficient use of space. It's also possible to get enough information about a word just from the index, some of the time. Apart from the Penguin Roget, all the major UK-published ones are now the modern alphabetical type, so they're ruled out instantly.