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The dictionary is intended by the author primarily for the use of school, college and university level students and contains about 200 pages of written matter with a few illustrations.

The author has acknowledged that he has ' drawn heavily from many internationally known dictionaries' and some of the entries are strikingly similar to the entries in Kendall and Buckland's "Dictionary of Statistical Terms". In a few entries the order of the sentences are rearranged. Most of the entries, however, seem to be those of the author and his associates.

Reference books with specific reliable information in the form of dictionaries are badly needed at a time like this when there is an explosion of knowledge. However, the book under review is not likely to be of much service.

It is unfortunate that in many instances, Roman letters are used instead of standard Greek letters. For example, the Greek letter chi is  printed as the Roman  letter X. Instead of the proper multiplication symbol the letter x is used and it is most confusing in expressions which contain the letter x as well. The square root sign is used rather carelessly leading to inaccurate expressions.

Many terms are expressed using formulas but individual terms in the formulas are left undefined. For instance, the coefficient of correlation is taken directly from Kendall and Buckland's "Dictionary of Statistical Terms" and given in the same notation in terms of a, b, c and d. The notation is not explained. In Kendall and Buckland's work, however, the notation is explained in the preceding entry but it has been overlooked by the author. If a, b, c and d are not defined, the formula for the coefficient of correlation is practically useless.

Some entries are quite erroneous and such inaccuracies should not be found in any book, let alone a dictionary. We quote in full the entry under Coding. "Coding refers to the addition, multiplication, subtraction or division of data by a constant. It is also used in writing instruction in computer programming language. The person doing the coding starts with a written description or a diagram representing the task to be carried out by the computer. He then converts this into a precise and ordered sequence of instructions in the language that he has selected". Coding is nothing of this sort.

It is claimed in the book cover that almost all the essential contents of theoretical and applied, parametric and "nonparametric" statistics have also been incorporated. What is given in the dictionary, however, is mainly oriented towards the kind of statistical knowledge that is useful in economics, such as index numbers and vital statistics. There is an entry on the drawbacks of Indian census where it is asserted without any justification that "most of the information given is biased, wrong or incomplete".

There are approximately 700 entries and the last quarter of the dictionary contains far more entries compared to the first. There are misprints, which should not be found in a good dictionary, and one hopes that the printing will greatly improve in the next edition.