In the News

Reprinted with permission from Editor & Publisher

It's More Than an Online Dictionary


yourDictionary.Com Is First and Last Word In Reference
By Charles Bowen

January 23, 2001 - To get started, visit the site at http://www.yourdictionary.com

Dictionaries have evolved in an amazing way in cyberspace. Before the decade of the World Wide Web, few of us Internet watchers would have put dictionaries on any list of cool foolproof tools. Hadn't dictionary technology pretty much been nailed down, say, 150 years ago? How could the Web improve on Webster? In lots of ways, as it turns out.

Imagine a dictionary that not only provides definitions, pronunciation and etymology, but also integrates:
  • A thesaurus to give you fast lists of similar words with each definition you look up.
  • Dozens of specialized glossaries and indexes for everything from ballet terms to nautical expressions to the languages of law, medicine and science, music and the arts, technology, and business.
  • Literally hundreds of dictionaries for other languages, such as French, Spanish, and German, of course, but also Hindi, Thai, and Russian.
  • Fast translation services and features to help you identify the source language of any phrase or word you want to enter. Guide books for rules of grammar in English and other languages.
  • A collection of other language tools for finding rhymes, acronyms, synonyms, antonyms, and homophones.

YourDictionary.com is a site that is making a powerful bid to anchor the writer and editor's reference shelf in the new millennium. It is a central Web portal for hundreds of word- related services all around the Internet, from reference books to databases to games. There even is a section devoted to words in the news.

Currently, the portal offers links to more than 1,500 dictionaries in more than 200 languages. YourDictionary.com evolved from the Web of Online Dictionaries launched by Robert Beard of Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., and covered in this column in April 1998. Beard is now "chief linguistics officer" of the new site.

To use yourDictionary.com, visit the site http:// www.yourdictionary.com where the introductory screen is topped with a "Quick Look-up" area with search boxes to enter a word directly in either the online Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary or Thesaurus. You may search for any form of a term, such as its plural or past tense form, or variant spellings.

Also, the dictionary has biographical and geographical names (there are entries for "Washington" as the man, the city, and the state), as well as common foreign words used in English, and many abbreviations. If you aren't sure how to spell a word, you can use commonly accepted wildcards, including the question mark (?) for a single character and an asterisk (*) for an undetermined number of characters. Both the dictionary and thesaurus return the first main entry that is an exact match for the word you entered in the look- up window.

Other main entries containing the word you typed are returned in a scrollable list box on the top right of the results page. You can access the definition of any word in this list by highlighting it and clicking on the "Go To" button.

For other features, scroll the introductory page to find hyperlinks on both the left and right sides of the screen. Among them are links to language dictionaries, specialty dictionaries, translators, language identifiers, grammar guides, and other language tools.

Other considerations in using yourDictionary.com for your writing and editing:
  • Click the "Word of the Day" link for words in the news. Following the recent presidential election, the history of the word "chad" was covered well.
  • The "ELI" link reaches one of the site's pet projects, the Endangered Language Initiative, which might provide story fodder for features editors and columnists. It tells the tale of 6800 languages and dialects spoken on the planet and how more than half are headed for extinction. The ELI is envisioned as a sanctuary for these dying languages - a resource for scholars and others.
  • If you find yourDictionary.com useful enough for your daily work, you might want to click the introductory page's "Free YD Lookup Button" link. This is a downloadable plug-in that will add a "yourDictionary.com" button to your Web browser.

Bowen writes columns, articles and books from West Virginia, and is host of the daily Internet News syndicated radio show (http:// www.netnewstoday.com). charlesbowen@compuserve.com

Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher

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