In the News

Q & A; Spelling, Windows 3.1 and Jammed CD Drives

December 7, 2000 (The New York Times)

Q. I do a fair amount of gardening writing and would very much appreciate a spelling-checker program that included botanical names. Is there such thing?

A. If you find your word-processing program consistently tripping over Latin names or scientific terms that are too numerous to enter manually into the program's dictionary, supplemental software can help speed things up.

There are a number of Web sites and software companies that offer specialized dictionaries for things like medical, legal or scientific terms, as well as for foreign languages.

For botanical terminology, you might want to look at the Biotech dictionary by Spellex (www.spellex.com/biotech.htm, (800) 442-9673).

The Biotech dictionary program works with word processors like Microsoft Word, Corel WordPerfect and Lotus Notes and the page-layout program QuarkXPress. It contains more than 130,000 terms from fields like botany, organic chemistry, microbiology and other life sciences.

The company says its botany word list contains more than 40,000 scientific and common names for plants, as well as terms related to plant taxonomy, morphology, physiology and diseases.

The Spellex Biotech program costs about $100, but you can download an evaluation copy from the Web site to try out first. The company also sells dictionaries for medical, legal and technical terms.

There are also a number of Web sites for people seeking specialized dictionaries. YourDictionary.com (www.yourdictionary.com), for example, has more than 50 sections devoted to topics like economic, finanical and marketing terms; theatrical references; engineering terminology; and lots of other subjects, including botany.