New Collins e-dictionary, the way forward

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 take a look to the list on my blog (under Lexistars) and to the Twittersfere.

This said, Collins site is very nicely designed, appealing and cool, I like its crowdsourcing soul and I think it is the way forward for online lexicography and terminology platforms.

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