All Math Words Dictionary

One of the difficulties many students experience in learning math skills has to do with the fact that an entire language, both spoken and written, has grown up around math. Students that acquire that language are successful in math studies. Students that do not acquire that language have serious problems with mathematics. This dictionary is designed to aid in the acquisition of the language of math. All Math Words Dictionary is written for students of pre-algebra, beginning algebra, geometry and intermediate algebra. This dictionary is written using the four 'C's of math writing: * Concise: Definitions are compact, yet understandable. * Complete: All words and phrases of interest to students of the target classes are included, plus a few just beyond the scope of the target classes. Tables of symbols and notation, formulas, and units of measurement, plus lists of properties of objects give the student all the information needed to understand the concepts and decipher many word problems. * Correct: The definitions have been thoroughly reviewed for mathematical and literary correctness. * Comprehensible: The definitions are written to be understood by students in the target classes. Abundant illustrations aid in understanding. This dictionary has: * over 3000 entries * more than 140 defined notations * in excess of 790 illustrations * International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) pronunciation guide< * greater than 1400 formulas, equations, definitions, examples, identities and expressions. While teaching high school math, Mr. McAdams noted that some students did not understand even simple math statements, such as “This equation is determinate.” Those students who had not acquired a basic math vocabulary were left behind, becoming frustrated and mentally dropping out of class. Mr. McAdams quickly added vocabulary exercises to his classroom teaching, but found that there were no adequate resources for vocabulary acquisition. All of the online math dictionaries and encyclopedias were either woefully incomplete, or written at a college level. He began by creating a vocabulary resource for his students, using as a guide the vocabulary from the textbooks the students were using. The list of words swiftly grew, and the task of preparing these resources quickly grew beyond what a full-time teacher could accomplish with all the other activities important to teaching. Mr. McAdams was amazed at the enormous size of the math vocabulary that students must gain to be fluent in math. He took the development of this important resource seriously, and after devoting nine years to its development, have created All Math Words Dictionary. The list of words and phrases to be defined was collected from various textbooks in use in the United States and United Kingdom. Each of these words was carefully researched to find all of the ways these words were used in middle school and high school math classes for pre-algebra, beginning algebra, geometry and intermediate algebra. The definitions were carefully crafted and critically explored to meet the goals of concise, complete, correct and comprehensible. Usefulness of these definitions for non-native English speakers was considered and pronunciation was developed using the IPA. Knowing that a picture sometimes is worth a thousand words, I added abundant illustrations to assist students in placing words in a visual context. The result of this extensive effort is All Math Words Dictionary, an important tool for math teachers.