Tumblr 101: Tips And Tricks To Get Started
Sebastian Thrun: Google's Driverless Car
43 words Firefox doesn't know
One of my favorite new features in Firefox 2.0 is the inline, as-you-type spell-check. I'm a pretty good speller, but everyone makes mistakes, and as a blogger it's great to have a spell-check feature that has my back but stays out of my way. Still, I've been occasionally surprised by the words Firefox doesn't have in its dictionary. Firefox of course allows you to add words to its dictionary by right-clicking on the word and choosing "Add to dictionary," and the words you add are stored in your "personal dictionary" file PERSDICT.DAT, which lives in your profile folder. After using Firefox 2 Beta 1 for a few weeks, I decided to poke around in it and see what words I had collected, and below you can find my 43 favorite words Firefox doesn't know.
|
|
|
You'll observe that many of them are technical terms, trade names, and neologisms, and I certainly don't fault Firefox for omitting them from its dictionary. I'm most amused, though, that "Mozilla" and "Firefox" aren't part of its vocabulary, though. Have you been using Firefox 2? Do you have any interesting entries in your PERSDICT.DAT? Post them in the comments below!
Comments
5
Subscribe to commentsJeff WheelerAug 5th 2006 6:20PM
On a slightly related note, Apple doesn't have “MacBook” in the OS X dictionary. I guess that would be an interesting way to find future product names, though.
priAug 5th 2006 7:50PM
my dictionary is slightly broken. firefox seems to recognize and underline misspelled words but if i right click for a correct spelling, there are no suggestions. all the other options are there like: "add to dictionary", "spell check this field"...
although the dictionary does work in thunderbird, but i'm guessing its using a different one, since its only version 1.5 and not 2.0 like firefox.
one thing that has always bothered me but its not a misspelling is "i". i wish it would 'correct' it to the uppercase "I". gmail has the same inconveience.
David G. HongAug 6th 2006 7:14PM
Words like 'weblog' should be used as 'web log'. The now popular word 'blog' caters for that shortening.
The word web should also be 'the Web'.
Jordan RunningAug 6th 2006 7:24PM
David: Contrary to what many, many less-than-clueful media outlets have printed, the term "blog" derives--and has always derived--from the word "weblog" (with no space), not "web log."
Note to self: Add "clueful" to list of words Firefox doesn't know.
Wayne GoodeAug 9th 2006 2:43PM
I remember using an early version of Word for the Mac, 3.0 I think it was, that had an unusual spell-check error. It did not know 'childcare' and suggested 'kidnap' as a replacement.
BTW, I really liked the spell checker in 2.0, but Firefox crashed several times an hour, so I reluctantly went back to 1.5.0.6. I miss the spell-checker though.