As the introductory chapter puts it, this volume presents “a multilingual and cross-cultural approach to the problem of how gender is lexically and socially categorised in … word-processing software” (p. 2). Positioned at the interface of gender studies and corpus analysis, this is a coordinated set of studies on the representation of gender in the Microsoft Word Thesaurus for 13 different languages: Czech, Dutch, English, German, Polish, Hungarian, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, and Chinese. The software versions examined are mostly from 2000–2002, with a couple of chapters comparing different versions and one (on Hungarian) drawing on additional Internet data. The chapter on English, one of the most elaborate in terms of data, compares the Word 11 Thesaurus for U.K., U.S., and Australian English, and the Word 11 and Word 6 versions for U.S. English. All chapters follow a common outline in terms of analysis and presentation, usefully summarized in the introduction. The main focus is on a number of “lexical pairs with special relevance to the linguistic categorization of woman and man” (9) such as man/woman, male/female, boy/girl. The authors examine the range of “meanings” (sememes) listed in the respective Thesaurus for each part of these pairs, and the range of synonyms for each meaning. These are then analyzed in terms of their frequency, balance (or rather lack thereof), connotations, the registers they originate from, and the social stereotypes they index. Each chapter starts with an overview of the gender system of the language, typically organized into grammatical, lexical, and social gender, followed by the analysis of selected lexical pairs. There are of course differences across chapters with regard to their analytic elaboration, the number of lexical pairs examined, and the way results are presented. Most discussion revolves around (sets of) lexical items, although a few chapters also offer quantifications. The overall result (summarized in pp. 12–18 of the Introduction) is downright critical of the representation of gender in the Word Thesauri, as encapsulated in comments such as “in many respects an unreliable text-editing tool” (Hungarian, 193), “simply a badly conceived instrument” (English, 75), “extreme unreliability” (Spanish, 167), “poor quality” (Greek, 105), “serious shortcomings” (German, 90), “deficient” (Czech, 38). All the chapters offer ample evidence of how these Thesauri perpetuate – sometimes in highly if unintentionally amusing ways – biased representations of gender and often blatantly sexist stereotypes. As the introductory summary suggests, “a hegemonic, patriarchal social system has been found to be dominant in all the languages considered” (13). However, the chapters generally fall short of explaining why this is the case, and it remains eventually unclear whether their common findings reflect a historically specific stage of software tool development, or the tradition and present state of lexicography in some of these countries/languages, or even the fact that gender bias is encoded more into the morphology and lexicon of some languages rather than of others. The chapters offer little help in disentangling these levels of interpretation. Comparisons with printed dictionaries are limited, and there was apparently no contact with software developers, even though a study of their production practices would probably shed light on some of the criticized findings. Even though the book’s title claims to address “new literacy,” the literacy practices related to the Word Thesauri – whether and how people actually use them – are not examined at all, and the perspective of (New) Literacy Studies is entirely absent (except in a few lines in the introduction). Nevertheless, this is a well-organized volume that offers a valuable comparative study of gender representations in word-processing thesauri and gender systems in several languages.