Tag: DICTIONARY

Ladies and gentlemen, today we bring you tidings of one of the most important developments in Web browser history: Internet Explorer finally has a decent spell checker that works on 32- and 64-bit Windows XP, Vista and 7. It's called Speckie, which, if you're completely devoid of higher brain function and need a helping hand, is a concatenation of spell check IE. Speckie is a free download, ...

Earlier, Erez covered Swype's excellent word-learning abilities. Not only is its built-in dictionary comprehensive, but it also learns names from your address book. There's still one stumbling block to switching to Swype, though: all of your custom words and phrases that you've already added to the dictionary. Depending on where you live, and your circle of friends, you probably use very different ...

Dictionary.com has offered two iOS apps available for quite a while, one being free and ad-supported, the other being $3.99 (but $2.99 for a limited time at the moment) and, as you may have guessed, ad-free. The latest update to the apps -- which brings the free version up to 3.0 and the paid app to version 2.0 -- adds voice-to-text support to both versions. This works pretty much as you'd ...

Think you have a good vocabulary? If that's true, Knoword lets you show it off... or find out that maybe it isn't as great as you thought. Knoword is a fast dictionary game. You'll be shown a definition along with the first letter of the word and you need to figure out what the word is. Once you type the word (correctly, mind you – spelling matters), you get points and get the next word. ...

It sometimes happens that a certain word eludes me. I know it exists, I even know what it sounds like or how it begins or ends -- but for the life of me, I can't recall what the exact word is. For situations like these, Tip of My Tongue can come in very handy. To find the word "download," I only had to tell it that it starts and ends with D, has W somewhere in the middle, and means ...

Language is a living thing. As the world changes, new words are invented, and older ones fade away and go out of circulation. Some would say that's the nature of the Universe. But do all of these words really have to die? After all, it's fun to use a unique word every now and then – it keeps your text from becoming too vappous. Save The Words is a project that's related to Oxford ...

Everyone knows what a mushroom looks like. But what do you call those fin-looking parts under the cap? You know, those thin, membrane-like things? That's the type of question you can't really use a regular dictionary for. You might get lucky with Wikipedia, but in this particular case, you won't. The Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary helps you answer questions like these. It's a large visual ...

RobinWords is a simple, non-Flash game. It starts you off with one four-letter word (in the screenshot, the game picked "mist"). You then need to come up with another valid four-letter word by changing just one of the letters in the word that the computer provided. You can't shuffle the sequence, either. So, in this case, I changed "mist" to "gist." Then, it's the computer's turn, and it has to ...

IdiomDictionary has a killer domain name, because that's exactly what it is: a dictionary for idioms. I have no idea how much the domain cost, but it appears to be quite clean of advertising. The site claims to explain the meaning of over 5,000 idioms. It does not seem to use an "established" dictionary for the definitions, but the explanations seem to be well written, concise, and ...

Google has had a "dictionary lookup" feature for a while now -- all you had to do was slap define: before your search term. But they've now made it better, and mostly, made it easier for people to find it: Just search for a "difficult" word, and a definition would pop up as the first result, with quick links to some dictionaries. What's interesting is that you don't get an instant definition for ...

Inline Search & Lookup is a neat quick-reference Chrome extension. You highlight a word and Alt-click it (or hit Alt-W), and a small popup window is instantly shown, containing the search results for the selected word in any of a number of resources that you've selected. The extension comes with support for a large number of search engines, dictionaries, and reference websites, but you can ...

When I first wrote about the Urban Dictionary, many people were quick to note that they already know the service. The Urban Dictionary may be well-known, but it is hard to say that it is well-regarded. True, it is "democratic." You can vote poor definitions down -- but it's not exactly a paragon of linguistic quality, though. I have recently come across the Macmillan Dictionary website. While I ...

Everyone knows you can use Google as a way of correcting your bad spelling. Just put in a word that you're not sure about, and it will give you the familiar "Did you mean?" result. There's no need to be embarrassed, just click through and find what you meant to search for. Well, now Google's going one step further with improved spelling correction. If it's absolutely sure you've botched the ...

As a writer, I often have to look words up. For years, Onelook.com has been my go-to tool. Whenever I need to look up a word, I use Onelook to directly search dozens of dictionaries, both plain English and specialized. The results page links directly to the entry I looked up in each dictionary, and getting multiple definitions is just a matter of Ctrl-clicking each of my favorite dictionaries ...

Joining 'unfriend' (the Word of 2009), 'Google' has just been dubbed the Word of the Decade by the American Dialect Society. It's probably the first time you've ever heard of the American Dialect Society (founded in 1889!), and almost certainly the last... until 2020! There was also voting for a variety of other categories (PDF): tweet was voted their word of 2009 (even though the Oxford ...