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Reprinted with permission from Media Life

Where Logophiliacs Lead the Hordes Are Following

Scholarly Word Site Draws Linguistically Curious
By Marty Beard

'Most people are interested in about 6,000 words. But there are really 800,000 words in English - such a wealth of words. When Microsoft is building a spellchecker, it's not interested in nuance.'

-Paul JJ Payack, President and C.E.O., yourDictionary.com

August 16, 2000 - As reading material, the traditional dictionary ranks right up there with the phone book: It's heavy, it's bulky and the print is tiny.

And how can you look up a word if you don't know how to spell it in the first place?

The web may be changing all that with sites like yourDictionary.com.

Using the dictionary may never be spine-tingling but it's becoming a lot more fun, and a lot easier.

YourDictionary.com calls itself a linguistics portal. Which is to say it's a place not just to look up words but to learn at least something about all things having to do with words.

But the site's proving it's not just for logophiliacs (word lovers), even if the Danville, Calif.-based web company's roots do lie in academia.

Unexpectedly, the dictionary and thesaurus site began attracting mainstream web surfers. Last year, about 5 million people visited the site.

That high traffic prompted Beard, who now serves as its CTO and Chief Linguistics Officer, to leave his university post and take the site commercial. It relaunched at the end of July as yourDictionary, with a staff of seven, not counting the roughly two dozen eminent linguists on its advisory panel.

"It turned into a general interest site without anyone really trying," says Paul J.J. Payack, yourDictionary.com's president and CEO. Now, the reborn dot.com sees itself as a media company.

Someday web-based dictionaries may replace the spell-check and thesaurus functions found within most word processing software.

"Most people are interested in about 6,000 words," says Payack. "But there are really 800,000 words in English - such a wealth of words. When Microsoft is building a spellchecker, it's not interested in nuance."

Payack won't go so far as to say yourDictionary plans to supplant spellcheckers, but he touts one feature. It's a "Lookup Button" that can be embedded in a browser's tool bar and allows users look up words while online.

To broaden its appeal to mainstream web surfers, yourDictionary.com emails registered members a "Word of the Day," complete with precise usage tips and etymology. It also features a "fun and games" section that boasts goofy syntax and a wide selection of crossword puzzles.

The site hasn't lost sight of its scholarly roots, though. Today, it features more than 1,500 dictionaries for more than 230 languages. It takes pride in its Endangered Language Initiative, which records the remnants of dying languages.

YourDictionary attracts 600,000 to 700,000 unique visitors a month, and expects to have received 1.8 million page views by the end of August.

Payack says that many yourDictionary visitors are well-educated people with children and high incomes - a desirable, even "unsurpassed," demographic.

YourDictionary also attracts 18 to 24-year-olds, who tend to be students. Students, while they may earn about a tenth of what the rest of their users make, hold the promise of becoming high earners.

And more women than men visit yourDictionary, which may reflect numbers in academia and on the web.

It's also a multinational demographic. Payack says that as much as 35 percent of yourDictionary visitors come from outside the U.S. About 1,000 visitors a week come from Russia, and French web surfers account for about 5 percent of traffic.

"We can highly target," Payack says. "Our advertisers and partners are trying to get to people outside the U.S. as well as inside the U.S." Visitors often register, and aren't shy about giving out their demographic data.

How is yourDictionary spreading the word about itself?

Payack says that yourDictionary is taking a counterintuitive approach to marketing.

"If everybody's doing it, we're not there," he says. "We wouldn't even consider doing ads during the Super Bowl. And we get more hits than half of the [internet] companies that advertised during the game."

For now, the site's focusing on partnerships, like the one it has with Merriam-Webster, although viral marketing has been effective, too.

It also plans to enlist sponsors for its Word of the Day feature.

©2001 Media Life