Published by rwatstein October 19th, 2008
in dictionaries.
Victor Mair writes: “The East Asians have an ongoing contest propelled by dictionary size envy. Everybody wants to see who can produce a dictionary with the most entries. Koreans at Dankook University have just compiled a dictionary that has outstripped anything yet generated by the Japanese or the Chinese themselves. After 30 years of labor and investing more than 31 billion KRW (more than $25 million U.S.), the South Koreans have just published the Chinese-Korean Unabridged Dictionary in 16 volumes. This humongous lexicon contains nearly half-a-million entries composed of 55,000 different characters.
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Published by rwatstein March 16th, 2008
in Google and dictionaries.
“I googled you,” “google me”: The word “google,” which has become synonymous with searching the Internet since the advent of the popular search engine of the same name, has just found its way into a US dictionary. Due out this fall, the 2008 edition of the venerable Merriam-Webster Dictionary features the verb along with several other new words. But associate editor Peter Sokolowski said the high-tech addition was born out of society setting a new language trend. “It’s not a decision; it’s the acknowledgement of its use in the newspapers, the literature, the media. It’s very commonly found in print and is used with no explanation,” Sokolowski told AFP.
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Published by rwatstein March 16th, 2008
in dictionaries and language.
Dictionarist is a language tool resembling a Swiss army knife: It’s a free online talking dictionary which provide translation in 13 languages.This cool language tool translates to and from English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Dutch, Greek, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. When combined, this makes 60 translation options (English to French, French to English, Spanish to Turkish, Turkish to Spanish etc.).
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Dictionarist web site
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Published by rwatstein December 22nd, 2007
in digital and dictionaries.
Definitions of “more 20,000 terms and more than 6,000 stunning illustrations of a wide variety of objects from all aspects of life.” Also includes audio clips of pronunciations. Searchable, or browsable by topics: astronomy, earth, plants, animals, humans, food, housing, clothing, arts and architecture, communications, transportation and machinery, energy, science, society, and sports and games. From Merriam-Webster. Note: may not work properly in all browsers.
Visual Dictionary Online website
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Published by rwatstein December 16th, 2007
in dictionaries.
When editors at the New Oxford American Dictionary recently announced that their word of the year was “locavore,” which means someone who eats locally grown food, they also became the very definition of publicity. In the last few weeks Ben Zimmer, an Oxford University Press dictionary editor, appeared on numerous radio shows and on a syndicated public radio program to talk about the word contest. The selection of locavore also had 25 mentions in major newspapers like The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington Post. “There are very few good ways to get publicity for a dictionary,” said Erin McKean, a lexicographer at Oxford.
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Published by rwatstein July 21st, 2007
in dictionaries.
It was a ginormous year for the wordsmiths at Merriam-Webster. Along with embracing the adjective that combines “gigantic” and “enormous,” the dictionary publishers also got into “Bollywood,” “sudoku” and “speed dating.” But their interest in India’s motion-picture industry, number puzzles and trendy ways to meet people was all meant for a higher cause: updating the company’s collegiate dictionary, which goes on sale this fall with about 100 new words.
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