Tag: ENGLISH

Google, in association with a couple of boffins from Harvard University, has just released an awesome tool that should entertain you for at least 10 minutes, and possibly more. It lets you compare words, or phrases, from a corpus totaling 500 billion words from 5.2 million books -- in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian and Spanish. The potential applications for such a tool are ...

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 ...

I first found (and bought) Editor back when I was editing English text for Gramlee. It's a unique, and pretty amazing, piece of software; its work starts where your spell checker stops. It catches all sorts of potential grammar and usage problems, and its alerts are informative enough for you to learn and make your own judgement call on whether or not you wish to change your text. Editor is made ...

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 ...

I know, I know, dictionaries are exciting. I'm sure you share my enthusiasm for the subject, right? Okay, so now that I've got you all riveted, I can tell you that Oxford press is launching an all new dictionary website, and it actually looks great. Lots of online services try to present a "modern dictionary" in a sort of cool mash-up way (Wordnik, I'm looking at you), but the result is usually ...

Quick! What's an eight-letter word that starts with R, ends with M, and has B somewhere in it?* I know that these are often life-or-death questions, especially if Scrabble is involved (or poetry, for that matter). It's a good thing we're in the 21st century and there are now handy tools like Word Finder. This handy little form, hidden away in, of all places, the Toolbox section of a photography ...

Language is an ever-changing landscape. That's a cliché if I ever heard one, but it's also true. Urban Dictionary is one of those must-know Web sites; I think it's the largest slang and street language dictionary online. It's incredibly "social," but the social features don't feel forced or bolted-on. They're at the very heart of the site: definitions get voted up or down and are presented ...

As Paper Rater so eloquently states in HUGE type, it's a free grammar and spelling check, with plagiarism detection thrown in for good measure. It's actually an interesting study in graphic design: Look at that screenshot. Would you rely on such a website for editing an important academic paper, a newspaper article, or any other important text? At first glance, I sure wouldn't. That "Use now ...

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 ...

digg_url = "http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2008/03/24/learn-a-new-language-at-babbel-por-favor/"; If you can't get enough of the English-language Weblogs, Inc. blogs, you can always check out some of the ones we serve up in other languages -- Autoblog Chinese or Engadget Spanish, for example. What? You don't know any other languages? Well, it's time you learned. Babbel is a well-designed ...

Oh the heady days when everything cool on the internet came from one of the 50 states. Those days are gone, but the U.S. has managed to maintain dominance among the ruling class of the Internet nevertheless, however, those days may be fading as well. Within a few years, China's population of Internet users will outnumber those in the U.S., changing the dominant language and, according to the ...

Could Mister Wong hold the fortune cookie you've been waiting for in social bookmarking? European users think so. Mister Wong is a social bookmarking site from Germany that's up against the strong del.icio.us, Furl, Sphere and Ma.gnolia. They have a lot of traffic hitting their European specific sites, but what could their recently launched English specific site offer that differentiates them from ...

After years of successful topics and entries that everyone has had the ability to contribe to, the online free encyclopedia is finally going offline. Ok, so it's not going offline in the traditional sense of shutting down, Wikipedia has created a DVD version of Wikipedia, with close to 2,000 hand picked articles from a group of academics and Wikipedia staff. The CD is selling for $13.99, which ...

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 ...

Despite widespread panic among parents and English teachers, it turns out that instant messaging isn't actually causing teens' grammar to deteriorate. A study by the University of Toronto that monitored the speech and IM habits of 70 teenagers found that "instant messaging language does mirror patterns in speech, but that teens, surprisingly, are actually using a fusion of different levels of ...