The first and second additions have gained widespread acceptance, and the quality of the conception has been appreciated. It opens larger aspects of investigation: It includes commonly used words of technical and special languages; it facilitates a survey on word formation and word groups; it notes the variants in orthography and pronunciation; it records all the irregular forms of verbs, nouns and adjectives. The method is explained in detail in the introduction. Lists of grapheme-phoneme and phoneme-grapheme correspondences enable the reader to various use and research of the vocabulary (more than 180,000 words).

The third edition has been revised and enlarged. Within the 26 main divisions the spelling-to-sound correspondences produce smaller or larger subdivisions of words. These are now headed by an indication (in bold type) of the phoneme (or string of phonemes) followed by the spelling string. This procedure facilitates the survey and illustrates the variety of word-formation.