There are only three reasons why this "Concise Dictionary" is to be mentioned at all:

  • its reference language is English with maybe 1.5 billion first and second language speakers
  • its author is a professor emeritus and acting president of the Academy of Esperanto
  • it's published by one of the best editing houses in "Esperanto land" (Mondial, New York) with professional book making and marketing

The "Concise" is an up-date of the 1969 first edition. Its wrong principles remained the same: "many keywords, few derivations, compound words or translations, no examples at all". The result is a word list, not a dictionary, lacking nearly everything necessary for disambiguation of multiple meanings, without phraseology or any explanation for the reader (typical are entries like "adz/o adze"). Already 40 years ago the Scotsman William Auld, one of the most famous Esperanto authors, underlined that this is dangerous for the beginner and useless for the advanced.

In his blog Wells showed poor knowledge of Esperanto lexicography, its achievements and tools. Even worse, his command of Esperanto's basic code, the Fundamento, is pretty limited. As a result you can't hardly trust the "dictionary" without crosschecking in a reliable reference book. I shall not bore you with details, you can read them in some 15 articles on several aspects of Wells' word lists.

English speakers not familiar with Esperanto should not take the low level presented by Wells as an indicator of the general state of Esperanto lexicography. Most modern Esperanto dictionaries are much better than his booklet. Just to mention a few recent works: Chinese-Esperanto, Esperanto-Czech, German-Esperanto-German, Italian-Esperanto, Esperanto-Croatian, Hungarian-Esperanto, Esperanto-Japanese, Esperanto-Dutch-Esperanto, Esperanto-Persian, Spanish-Esperanto and others. His work is somewhere close to the new dictionary Esperanto-Nepali-Esperanto or Esperanto-Tajik, which is okay, acceptable and welcomed for Nepali and Tajik, but not for English. Again, if it was not for an Esperanto dictionary of English written by the president of the Academy and published by Mondial, the outdated "Concise" would not be even worth a review.

Some sample pages can be found on the Amazon webside, some more as Google book.

P.S.: I apologize for my limited English, I feel more at ease in Esperanto.