If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table?
neh.gov
neh.gov
The advantage of using a phone book was that a new one was delivered, completely for free, every year, so you just had to hang on to an old one if you were particularly fastidious, and otherwise just used the current one. And they were softbacks, so were more comfy to sit on than a hardback dictionary. Not to mention that not all households had a dictionary, while I seem to recall that the market penetration of landlines was something like 98% of American households (with subsidization for poorer folks) and they all had phone books; both were pretty much necessary to carry on a normal life.
Now, let me tell you about paper roadmaps, and how they were available for free at pretty much all gas stations (though the ones at Esso were considered the best), on a little rack near the door. No problem perusing the selection while your gas was pumped and oil checked by the attendants. (And there was no food or candy available to buy, so your other options for amusement were pretty limited).
Speaking of road maps, my first real road trip, early 90s, I used a AAA TripTik. I’m glad not to need that anymore, but there’s still a place in the world for paper maps.
It's hard for me to imagine an information technology that's been more thoroughly superseded than the print dictionary. Electronic media make it faster to look words up in the first place, sure. But I also get audible pronunciations, and, if a definition includes another word I don't know, I can just tap on it to navigate to its definition. A print encyclopedia, you can at least sit down with a volume and just read it, and it's an experience that's sometimes more fun than surfing Wikipedia, by virtue of feeling a bit more random and serendipitous. But using a dictionary is always vaguely unpleasant; all you want to do is accomplish a specific task and then get back to your business.
The author is right. They really do derive most their value these days from being, in effect, large blocks of wood.
And of course it never lost its place as the canonical Scrabble-checker.
My father had an "Official Scrabble Word List" book, which was just a list of words without definitions. An app would be even better for this: you could take a photo of the word, and it could give a simple yes/no without any chance of "accidentally" seeing other words.
As for Scrabble, https://scrabble.hasbro.com/en-us/tools#dictionary works just fine, although it needs JavaScript.
I've never actually used the online OED, but I imagine it's great.
Though, agreed with others that Wiktionary is good. It often offers higher-quality entries than the commercial ones, too.
I've been learning Portuguese lately and quite naturally, having grown up using dictionaries extensively, I bought a Portuguese dictionary. I end up not using it, I just look up on my smartphone instead. The main problem is not so much the lookup speed but the fact that a small pocket dictionary simply doesn't have enough words while large ones are way too bulky to use comfortably and carry around.
I suspect that for people learning languages with a more complex script (chinese comes to mind) modern technology make things a lot easier as well, I remember reading that looking up words in a Chinese dictionary could be quite complicated for a beginner.
Once you have a character, "word" or sentence, it will give an English definition, male and female pronunciation, show the correct way to write the character in simplified (PRC) or traditional (HK, TW, SG etc) script, link to the component characters, and link to the characters to which it itself is a component. And give example sentences (with pronunciation).
The basic version is free, but it's one of the few Android apps I paid for.
It's honestly not that bad once you learn a little about recognizing the radicals [0] that make up each character. The way these dictionaries work, at least for Japanese, is that you first lookup the main radical, and then you just need the stroke count [1] of the second component. These radicals/components are reused often so once you learn how to write a few of them you can get decent at counting the strokes (a dictionary I perused actually recommends breaking the non-radical part into common components and just summing up their parts to count faster). This narrows it down pretty well and then you just have to visually search for the character.
There are also alternative methods that can be used such as that of Kodansha's Kanji Learner's Dictionary [1], which uses a three-number code, with the first being how the radical and its component are visually oriented, and the other two their respective stroke counts. I've also learned the four corner method, [2] and while it can seem deceptively simple, it's also remarkably unintuitive in what part of the kanji is considered a corner (and also relies on a specific writing of the kanji).
Of course modern technology does make it a tad easier, especially for those who have no clue about things like radicals. The online dictionary Jisho [3] for example lets you search by radicals where you can select each radical—even a sub-component—regardless of position, and it'll just give you a set of kanji containing those radicals, ordered by total stroke count. You can also draw the kanji, but in my experience this works very sub-optimally, and still depends on using the right number of the ever-important stroke count. I own a denshi jisho [4] which lets you draw the kanji with a stylus, and that works a lot better.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodansha_Kanji_Learner%27s_Dic...
[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-Corner_Method
[3]: https://jisho.org/
[4]: Literally "electronic dictionary", they're veritable beasts, and contain not only multiple Japanese dictionaries, they also have specialized dictionaries (like business), J-E and E-J dictionaries, pronunciation dictionaries with audio, encyclopedias, other multilingual phrasebooks, practice for the TOEIC, and so many more that are too numerous to list.
-We asked "What is the state of the USA in five words? The responses are not what we imagined."
-Can you translate these famous quotes from emoji?
- How is pansexuality different from bisexuality?
- Epic Fail. (seriously, the article is titled this.)
- When a cat is so cute you want to bite its face? (sic) There's a word for that!
Those are some of the articles on the front page. Clickbait, on a dictionary. Then you start to wonder why you are trusting it when it needs to monetize with clickbait.
I'm interested in that, but certainly not interested enough to watch a video.
Fortunately, a quick search tells me the word is "petrichor", and has the etymology [1].
I can't find a word for the cute biting. All the sites have maximum-GDPR all-the-tracking boxes, which is my new cue to hit "back".
Online dictionaries are likely to be backed by, well, a dictionary, which allows for O(1) look-ups.
I think that this is true only under simplifying assumptions of a sort that would also allow one to claim that dictionary look ups are O(1) (with constant equal to the size of the dictionary).
Is your functional literacy really so dictionary-bound that a temporary outage makes you lose a large part of it? (Maybe it is! But I think that, for most people, referring to a dictionary, online or in print, is an occasional act.)
I personally confer a dictionary whenever I write more than a paragraph of text. Most people don't do that, but they should.
I do sometimes check spelling when my word processor hasn't figured it out for me. But I can't say that I'm normally particularly uncertain about the meaning of the vast majority of words I use.
Ever so often I check a word to verify that it really does have the precise meaning I think it does. But I can't say doing so is at all common. I'm exposed to a lot of bad writing but the problems are more around structure and logic. Incorrect vocabulary usually isn't a big problem in my experience.
I agree! (Further it is impossible to know a good dictionary by heart, since it should be updated regularly.) I didn't mean to suggest that normal people don't need dictionaries, only that it seems a bit extreme to suggest that a large part of functional literacy (not just fluency or eloquence) would be lost by a temporary loss of access to one.
> I personally confer a dictionary whenever I write more than a paragraph of text. Most people don't do that, but they should.
Just this one time, I hope that it is OK for me to nit-pick and point out that you almost certainly mean 'consult', not 'confer'.
Another irritation is that you can find support for any possible meaning of a word or phrase if look around -- with sites like urbandictionary.com all it takes is 1 person to invent a meaning and if you're not careful, you'd think that it's an accepted usage. It takes way more work now to be sure of any result.
They did it, for the same reason, or at least to prevent copiers stealing their customers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry .
Well, sure. That's what the yellow pages basically are--advertising for local businesses. (There may be some level of listing that's free. I don't know.) As other have noted, my local yellow pages is pretty small and thin these days though with the caveat that I don't live in a city. I suspect that a listing/ad is no longer quite the requirement for local businesses that it once was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Information_Service
Jordan Hubbard has YP to thank for the infamous "rwall incident" of 1987:
Or Peskin and Schroeder if you still need the information from H&H
Plus, your comment violates HN comment policy.