GERDI. The Great English-Romanian Dictionary of Idioms. Bucureşti: Editura Coresi 2007 by SĂILEANU Cristian, POENARU Vasile

Abstract

The work under review is co-authored by Vasile Poenaru, writer, translator and
lexicographer and Cristian Săileanu, a writer and teacher of English in the United States. In
their Foreword, Poenaru tells the reader how the dictionary was born, how his friend living in
California, Săileanu, has, for two decades, worked on a kind of ‘survival kit’, an enormous
collection of English idiomatic expressions, collocations, phrasal verbs, verbal clichés, dicta,
famous quotations, proverbs and sayings. That was “everything he needed in order to
integrate himself seamlessly in the American culture and be able to teach English to the
native speakers of the language in their own country.” Compiling the dictionary proper took
the two authors “another seven years of extremely strenuous and dedicated efforts” (p. 8).
We can only think of the hard work of separating idioms from other multiword lexical units
to make an idea of a part of the whole undertaking.