Tag: DICTIONARY

This is why we love Google. We get it: they want to take over the world, bit by bit, slowly but surely -- but, at the end of the day, they offer high-quality services at unbeatable prices (i.e. free). Occasionally it can certainly get a little claustrophobic, messing around in Google's playground -- you're free to wander around, sample the goods, enjoy the ride... but don't try to actually leave. ...

Did you even know that there was a New Oxford American Dictionary? I didn't. But with their recent addition of 'unfriend' to the American language, that might soon change. Maybe this was their way of leaving the realm of obscurity... and into hilarity! "It has both currency and potential longevity," says Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary program. She goes on to ...

The saga of Apple's inexplicable App Store approval policies just got even weirder. This time, a dictionary iPhone app was rejected for containing profanity, and only accepted once a 17+ rating was attached, and the allegedly obscene words were removed from the app. Even more frustrating is that Ninjawords, the censored dictionary, distinguishes itself by using different sources for its ...

Wordnik is a bit like a dictionary, in the sense that it collects words and their definitions, but it aspires to be more than that. Users contribute example sentences, audio pronunciations, images from Flickr and more, so you can really get a good idea of how and when a word is used. There's also a thesaurus-plus "related words" feature, which shows not only synonyms and antonyms, but other ...

Lower your geek radar detector. You got me. I am a tech blogger. I also have a degree in library science. Guilty as charged, just put me on a cell block with wireless and a supply of graphic novels. I am a librarian who is really okay with wikis. Would I accept every entry in one as gospel? No, but questioning is good in print, too. I believe wikis are, by and large, a decent starting point for ...

Firefox is great on its own, but we love us an addon that makes it even more powerful. Wikilook fits the bill, making it a snap to look up definitions for unfamiliar words. Sure, you can just google a term or head over to Wiktionary and key in a search, but Wikilook will do it for you without ever leaving your current page. It's dead simple to use: hold down shift and hover over a word, wait ...

Ever find yourself puzzling over an unfamiliar word on a web page? Sure, you could open a new browser tab and look it up at Dictionary.com. Or you could just drag a Lingro bookmarklet to your browser toolbar and hit it to make every word on a web page clickable. When you select a word a definition will pop up, assuming you've set the tool to translate from English to English. You can also click ...

There must be something in the water this week. While the biggest new media acquisition story of the day has to be CBS buying CNET for $1.8 billion, big companies are swallowing up smaller ones left and right. Media company Comcast is buying social networking site Plaxo for something like $150 million, while Ask.com is shelling out an undisclosed sum for Lexico, the company that runs ...

How often have you started arguing with a friend over the correct pronunciation of a word? You know, the kind of word that you read all the time, but suddenly realize you've never heard spoken out loud. Well, before you beat your friend to a bloody pulp, you might want to check out howjsay, an online pronunciation dictionary. All you do is type in a word, and howjsay will speak that word back to ...

Thanks to Dictionary.com and a thousand other websites, it's probably been years since you've cracked open that unabridged dictionary you keep around the house just to look even geekier than you really are. But when you want more than a quick definition, VisuWords can give you a whole new way to look at the English language. Type a word into VisuWords search bar and the word pops up, along with ...

Getting around Wikipedia could take shorter than you have been previously use to. For instance, do you know about the keyboard shortcuts? Keyboard shortcuts aren't a well known feature for users of the popular online encyclopedia, but they do exist. I recently came across a post by Steve Rubel reminding me of this fact. These keyboard shortcuts work with any browser, and on both PC and Mac ...

Google has a little problem in China lately. It seems as though some software developed by a rival company ended up in a recently released Chinese software tool that Google 'developed'. Google apologized once they were called out for after they found out about Sohu's software being inside of their Pinyin Input Method Editor. For their part, Google said that Sohu's software it was used during ...

I like ninjas. That being said, I don't really associate ninjas with dictionaries. However, Ninjawords aims to change that. Or something. Ninjawords is a simple Ajax dictionary that aspires to be like a ninja: smart, accurate, and really fast. Type in your word, smack the enter key, and you definition pops up. That's it! Yes, a very simple tool, and a pretty obvious use of Ajax at that, but I ...

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 ...

In my opinion, selling software on a USB drive is a fantastic idea, and Merriam-Webster has taken it and run with it with their USB Dictionary & Thesaurus. It's a 256MB flash drive that includes MW's dictionary and thesaurus software, plus phonetic spelling correction, a grammar guide, and a "Confusables" function for correcting mistakes like their vs. there vs. they're. It also includes ...