Tag: DICTIONARY

If, like the great Sylvia Plath, you punctiliously plot your prose with a thesaurus, may we entreat you to visit Save the Words? The prim nebbishes over at the Oxford University Press went crazy with Flash to develop the site, which features words that have all but disappeared from standard English usage and also asks users to "adopt" the archaisms in their daily communications. In a tragicomic ...

Earlier this week, we reported that Amazon was upping its game with even cheaper versions of the Kindle, but it has also updated the Kindle app on the iPad/iPhone/iPod touch, adding a couple of unremarkable yet needed features. The Kindle app now has a search function, which was inexplicably absent before. It's also able to look up words and phrases through Wikipedia and Google, but not within ...

The browser add-on debate has been raging for years. Do those helpful little plug-ins help productivity or just grind your browser to a halt? Frankly, we can't live without them, and we think you might enjoy some of our favorite helpful additions, as well. With Chrome finally having a solid community of developers pumping out extensions, we thought it a perfect time to pick 13 essential plug-ins ...

The modern smartphone possesses the ability to surf the internet, scan retinas, fly a hovercraft and even make calls using your left hand. So, you'd think getting one of these hunks of plastic to send a sensible text would be a cinch. It's not, however. Auto-correction software for phones too often mutates a word into something completely nonsensical or embarrassing. [Ed. Note: We once had a ...

Among the many "secret" keyboard shortcuts on a Mac are a couple that are a boon to the spelling-challenged. To quickly spell-check a word you're typing, begin typing the word and then hit Option+Esc. A list of words will pop up, a la your cell phone's predictive text function. Although it works in most Mac apps, it sadly doesn't in either Office or Firefox. To find the definition of a word, ...

Try hard to remember the last time you picked up a dictionary. (You know, that big, old dusty book with gold-leaf on the cover.) For those who've grown up in the 'Age of Google,' it might be hard to recall. Because, with a few keystrokes and a click of a button, a search engine can retrieve the definition of any word, not only in the English language, but many others, too. According to The Wall ...

The English language is about to pass a historic milestone, at least according to the Global Language Monitor, a group that monitors language. The one millionth English word is nearly upon us. What this will be isn't known yet, but in the running are a number of words straight from the Internet, including "defriend" and "noob." The standard used by the Global Language monitor requires that the ...

The editors of Webster's New World dictionary have announced 'overshare' as the Word of the Year, reports Urlesque. In the above video, Mike Agnes, the dictionary's Editor in Chief defines 'overshare' thusly: Typically a verb, but also used as a noun, it is the name given to 'too much information,' whether willingly offered or inadvertently revealed. It is the word for both the tedious ...

If you had to pick a single notable word that stands out in your mind from 2007, what would be it? It's okay, take your time. This probably isn't the sort of question you ponder on a daily basis -- or perhaps ever. But, among dictionary-types, it's a (mildly) prestigious honor to be nominated word of this year, and this year that honor has been granted to a string of four characters that many ...