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The Word Wise Web
Online Dictionaries Are Breaking Down the Language Barrier

April 16, 2000 - Cyberslang, the geek word for the jargon of the Internet, has grown so dense and baffling that there is now an online dictionary to guide us through its mysteries. If you can't tell an Annie (an 'orphaned' Website that needs updating) from an Archie (a piece of software that needs updating), you need to check in with the dialect trackers at Netlingo.

There is now an online dictionary for almost everything, from standard English to the quirky vernacular of skateboard dudes. There is a dictionary of dental technology, a dictionary of basic Chaucer, a dictionary of Chinese surnames, a dictionary of explosives, a dictionary of Hebrew slang and now, adding its considerable weight (137lb) to Net lexicography, the grand old dowager of the word business, the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED has put its 20-volume second edition online as the dictionary is undergoing a £34 million revision that will take until 2010 and is expected to double the number of entries to 1.3 million. The first edition took 70 years to compile. When it was finished in 1928, the 10-volume set sold for 50 guineas. Using the OED will now be much easier but rather more expensive. A subscription to the online edition will cost £350 for individuals and £500 for institutions, but you can get a free tour of the site.

Dictionaries are one more thing to have profited from the Net's ability to expose the esoteric to a big and curious universe. There's the Dictionary of Mountain Bike Slang (mothers will be relieved to find that 'to bonk' is to run out of energy on the pedals) and the Magician's Dictionary, which tells us that there are 13 types of magic, none of them to do with sawing a lady in half or fishing a dove out of your trousers. For those that don't know their apse from their spandrel, there's even a dictionary of castle-building terms.

These and many more can be found at the mothership of online word power, a site called One Look Dictionaries. It offers nearly three million words in specialised dictionaries devoted to such diverse things as knitting, freemasonry, croquet, orchids, English feudal terms, opera pronunciation, Eastern philosophy, acronyms, gems, forestry, and space and electronic warfare.

Students of the truly arcane won't want to miss Forthright's Phrontistery ('a thinking place'), where, among other linguistic labours, thousands of 'rare and obsolete' words are being lovingly warehoused. Such things as decaudate (cutting off the tail), floccilation (plucking fitfully at the bedclothes) and pandiculation (stretching and yawning) will be preserved in electronic eternity.

Another engagingly expansive site, yourDictionary.com, is run by an American academic called Robert Beard and connects to dictionaries that translate 224 languages. They run from Afrikaans to Zulu, and include Pidgin, Rasta, Navajo, Cherokee, Eskimo, Creole, Maori and - in case Grozny ever becomes a tourist trap - Chechen.

Unfortunately, Beard has no British-American dictionary, but the famous transatlantic language gap is well catered for at an American-run site called Britspeak. It provides links to a dozen dictionaries that uphold the idea that English is a second language for Americans, and vice versa, among them one devoted entirely to the vocabulary of Men Behaving Badly, and an exploration of Cockney rhyming slang.

Many feature a daily word to increase our linguistic skills. A Word a Day e-mails you a new word - grok, bleb, bandersnatch, disembogue - each morning. So now, more than a quarter of a million people in 184 countries are bounding out of bed and giving their vocabulary a vigorous workout while the rest of us are still pandiculating.