WordLo

I had the pleasure to interview for TermCoord my favourite lexistar Erin McKean.

I have her quote on my blog, I’m enjoying Wordnik since its creation (when it had the colourful bricks falling down from the top of the home page), loved her TEDVideo and enjoying her articles and tweets! I Iike her enthusiasm and love for words and her disruptive approach to lexicography. I dare to say that her answers represent a break from traditional lexicography by destroying the two milestones of lexicography: the definition and the authority of the dictionary.
The end of definition: Erin says “I think a good definition is like a good poem: beautiful and worthwhile in itself.”  We don’t need definitions anymore, they can even limit our understanding of the word: “when you limit your knowledge of a word to just the definition, you limit your understanding as well”. They were suitable for paper dictionaries, where the available space was limited: “Definitions are still helpful when space is limited”. In…

Most people today get their reference information via their computer, tablet, or phone and the message is clear: the future of the dictionary is digital.

Macmillan Dictionaries announced last Monday (5th of November 2012) it will no longer appear as physical books and from next year it will be available only online.
According to its Editor-in-Chief Michael Rundell, this transition can only be a positive one: the internet is the ideal medium.  “The traditional book format is very limiting for any kind of reference work. Books are out of date as soon as they're printed, and the space constraints they impose often compromise our goals of clarity and completeness. There is so much more we can do for our users in digital media.”

Macmillan Dictionary Online provides an English dictionary and thesaurus, as well as a popular blog about topical issues, a weekly 'Buzzword' column on newly-emerging words, and the crowd-sourced 'Open Dictionary'. Macmillan Dictionary Online als…

In recent weeks I have found myself really obsessed with searching for a one stop stop for terminology search and dictionary/thesaurus lookups. 
I acknowledge that we already have a wealth of tools at our disposal and I am simply glad that we have access to all these online research resources which weren't around 20 years ago. Even if the few seconds or minutes required switching from one site to another don't bother us, I’m realizing that what we want is to search a range of resources without visiting individual websites.

So far the tool that better performs this function seems to be Memidex.
Memidex is a free online dictionary and thesaurus with a simple interface, complete inflections, auto-suggest, adult-filtering, frequent updates, a browsable index, support for mobile devices, and millions of external reference links for definitions, audio, and etymology.   The original Memidex database was derived from the high-quality WordNet® database developed by Princeton Universit…

I was reading the article “Dictionaries are not democratic” and I loved it because I completely disagree with J. Green’s view causing me to write this post to reject all his points.
Jonathon Green fails to realise one very important thing: it is the users of language that determine the definitions of words, not lexicographers.Language is fluid, lexicographers just record the up of a point of a term.

Dog-eared dictionaries and old e-dictionaries were not democratic, but the truth is actually the opposite: the internet and search engines enables us to search the corpus for ourselves, to observe any particular word, collocation, or phrase in context, and this is often a better method than the dictionary. 

Moreover, I find it revolutionary, and democratic that people, word lovers like me, are dedicating themselves to recording, forming and promoting neologisms. In the past years, since I opened this blog, I have seen an impressive number of websites and blogs devoted to neologisms. Just tak…

Word Cloud: A Film Inspired by the Visual Thesaurus.

For a word lover there is nothing better than seeing the gentle explosions of words!!

More info: http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/blogexcerpts/word-cloud-a-film-inspired-by-the-visual-thesaurus/

Toss out that dog-eared dictionary and worn-out thesaurus, and use this amazingly helpful tool!

Professor David Crystal, one of the world's leading linguistic experts, challenges the myth that new communication technologies are destroying language