Tag: dictionary

  • i liek this alot

    Back when I was paid to really care about spelling, I made a crude little UK-US spelling equivalency dictionary. Typeset it in LaTeX, too:

    I found the source files last night (including the entire database for the long out-of-print source book, in its own odd little text format) and I’m amazed how little of it I still understand. This is a shame, as I’m about to embark on another little typesetting project of my own …

  • Save Chambers Harrap in Edinburgh

    Harry writes:

    As you may have heard, the historic dictionary firm of Chambers in
    Edinburgh is threatened with closure by the parent company Hachette
    Livre
    .

    They intend moving the English dictionaries to London and the
    bilingual Harrap titles to Paris, involving not just the loss of 27
    jobs in Edinburgh but the end of a publishing tradition going back
    nearly two centuries.  Chambers is a Scottish and British institution
    dear to the hearts of word-lovers.

    Yes, the advent of free resources on the internet has changed the
    world of reference publishing, but it is far from clear whether all
    options for the future of Chambers Harrap have been properly
    considered in what appears to be a very drastic and possibly even
    underhand move by Hachette.  I feel strongly we shouldn’t just accept
    this as inevitable.  Hachette should be forced at the very least to
    undertake a properly full and open review of the situation first, in
    due consultation with the NUJ.  If you wish to join with others in
    urging them to think again, you may like to sign the online petition
    at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/chambers-in-edinburgh/.  It only
    takes a few seconds.

    More at http://sn.im/chambersharrap and http://harrycampbell.blogspot.com.

  • well, actually, currently none of the words

    Despit the nice article in csmonitor, Wordnik isn’t yet public. Building buzz for “coming soon” websites is a bit 1999 – we want our content now, please.

  • M-W Visual Dictionary Online

    M-W’s Visual Dictionary Online is rather good. F’rinstance: ENERGY :: WIND ENERGY.

    Update: whoa, I just looked at this on IE, and it’s an absolute ad-beast. It has been a while since I surfed with ads enabled.

  • big boy’s book of big things

    Christmas came early. With money from Carlyle, I bought a reproduction of Knight’s American Mechanical Dictionary, a three-tome work from the 1870s which catalogued mechanisms, devices and machinery known at the time. It’s the ultimate nerd read.

    You can browse two electronic versions online:

    • at UMich; large page images.
    • at Princeton Imaging; in DjVu format, this is a little easier to read if you have the right plugin.

    I have to say, though, that the dead tree version is a splendid read.

  • Tiger’s Dictionary

    OS X Tiger's Dictionary
    I was pleased to see that Apple had included a comprehensive dictionary with OS X 10.4. The Oxford American is a decent enough reference tome, and the computer implementation isn’t bad at all.

    The typography’s fairly clean, if rather heavy on the whitespace. Cross references are active; if one clicks on the small-caps word whitlow, you’ll go to its definition (if you have to; it’s kinda nasty). For some reason, the Dashboard version of the dictionary doesn’t have active xrefs.

    Searching isn’t as good as it could be. As with most electronic products, it assumes you already know how to spell the word. The incremental search does allow that, as long as you have the first few letters right, the list of possible choices is quite small. Like all electronic dictionaries that I’ve seen, it’s not possible to browse the text in that spectacularly non-linear way that makes a real paper dictionary fun.

    It does seem to have a good few Canadian terms, but a true Canadian dictionary should be shipped with Canadian Tiger. Correct spelling isn’t just optional. It also only labels British and Canadian spellings as ‘British’.

    So, in summary, pretty good, but far from perfect.

  • the word “bummer”

    WordReference used to have all the Collins dictionaries available online, for free browsing. I was the main dictionary computing guy at Collins when this deal was made, and it was pretty cool to have a good, non-US English dictionary on the web.

    I gues the money has run out, as the Collins data has disappeared, and the English dictionary is derived from WordNet. While I think that WordNet‘s a worthy project, it doesn’t quite compare to the Collins English Dictionary.

    Oh well, it was good to know you, WordReference.

  • Catching up with words

    While I was back in Scotland, I met up with many of my old colleagues from Collins Dictionaries. We had a very pleasant evening with Ian Brookes, who is now the editor-in-chief of the Chambers dictionary.

    Chambers is an unusual dictionary, in that it has a sprinkling of amusing definitions. One of these is mullet, defined as a hairstyle that is short at the front, long at the back, and ridiculous all round. There are also rare definitions, such as:

    paneity n the state of being bread 

    After reading that, I knew I had to buy the latest edition. Does this make me a word nerd?

    Chambers publish a booklet on their dictionary, which is available online: Words, Wit and Wisdom (or local copy, since it’s fallen off their site: wit_wisdom).