Good dictionaries are hand-compiled by experienced lexicographers. Not Google's strength, to put it mildly.
What Google would be extremely good at is creating corpora for all these languages. An example of an excellent Spanish corpus is the following: http://www.corpusdelespanol.org/x.asp
Good encyclopedias are written by large numbers of individual contributors with expertise in specialized fields, who barely get paid for their efforts, most of the money from encyclopedias going to pay for the organization, compilation, editing, etc. It turns out that the latter can now be much more effectively decentralized than ever before, and contributors no longer need to be explicitly recruited. (which is certainly not to say that Wikipedia isn’t dramatically different from other encyclopedias)
Dictionaries are still compiled by experienced lexicographers.
* * *
Incidentally, does anyone know of a good online thesaurus, now that thesaurus.com is no longer using decent source material (after being hit with a lawsuit for essentially stealing it). All the ones online seem to use Roget’s II, which is vastly inferior to the original Roget’s.
It depends on how we're [re]defining "dictionary." A dictionary has the potential to be a set of pairs of words, and any of the following:
1. how the word is used,
2. what the consensus is on how the word is used,
3. what the consensus is on how we 'should' use the word,
4. what the consensus of people who are, by consensus,
considered "experienced lexicographers", is, on how the word is used,
5. and what the consensus of people who are, by consensus, considered "experienced lexicographers," is, on how the word 'should' be used.
Google is trying the first approach, defining words by trying to learn them itself, like a person who naturally "absorbs" a word by hearing it used in the right context enough. The second is how people usually learn words, by asking others what they mean when they hear them. The third is prescriptivism, but ruled by the majority: words such as "ur" 'should' be valid, and so on, in the majority's opinion. The forth is what dictionaries try to contain, and the fifth is what books of "advice" like Strunk and White contain. All are different, though some overlap (as, e.g., 3 may be influenced by 5.)
I don't see how Google does that. I see Google collecting online all the online dictionaries they can find, and uniting them under a single interface, but I haven't found any dictionaries where they have contributed content.
I have heard about Google using lot of local language expertise for things like validating the ranks for local language search results. So, this might also have been vetted by such a group.
It's great that they used definitions from the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary (http://www.antimoon.com/how/cobuild-review.htm). Collins was the pioneer of corpus-based full-sentence definitions back in the 90s. Nowadays, there are better choices for an English learner (e.g. the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English), but COBUILD is still miles ahead of open projects like Wiktionary.
Overall, good news for English learners in the short term, but not so much in the long run (who's going to make dictionaries if you can no longer sell them for money?).
Thanks for the recommendation. I've used LEO. However, I was looking for something more comprehensive, (perhaps more authoritative), and also in a more readable format.
It would be nice if there were a way to get straight to it from a regular search though. It is still more convenient for me (in Firefox) to hit Command+k and type "define:".
Also, it'd be nice if Google could just read my mind instead of me having to laboriously type in search queries.
2. right-click on the search box, select "add a keyword for this search"
3. for "keyword: " type "def" , for "name: " type "Google Dictionary Search"
Now in your address bar, type "def uniquity"
While you're at it, replace all your search engines with this method and remove your search box. optional: install tiny-menu, move everything from your navigation-toolbar to your top toolbar, hide navigation-bar.
Actually, I already know about that. What I wanted you to tell me (because I was too lazy to find it out for myself) was that I can change the search engine used via the Command+Up/Down keys.
Still, those arrow keys are all the way down there and I can type "define:" pretty fast...
I'm learning Dutch, and it's even worse. Really basic, commonly used words aren't there.
Good dictionaries are hard to build. At the same time, the web isn't constrained by space the same way a physical book is, which means that a result should have even more information. You shouldn't accept an online dictionary that gives you only one simple usage of a word.
A good dictionary will list the short & sweet definition, alternative definitions, forms, example usages, pronunciation, history, usages in various situations/jargon, idioms, and word history. This dictionary just points you to a wiki.
I'm Dutch, and I use the electronic Van Dale Groot Woordenboek (€99). Google will give you wiktionary for the word "slim" ( http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slim )
That site refers you to "Babylon 8", another installable dictionary which just came out with a Mac version. I'm not sure if it returns the same results as the site, but if it does I'd say it's a pretty good competitor for the VDGW (which is truly fantastic, itself).
Contrast this with the Oxford English Dictionary's entry for Hacker, noun:
1. One who hacks; one who hoes with a hack.
2. That which hacks; an implement for hacking, chopping
wood, or breaking up earth; a chopper, cleaver; a hoe,
mattock.
3a. A person with an enthusiasm for programming or using
computers as an end in itself. colloq. (orig. U.S.).
3b. A person who uses his skill with computers to try to
gain unauthorized access to computer files or
networks. colloq.
One of the quotations listed under 3b. is also notable:
1983 Byte May 298/1 ‘Hacker’ seems to have originated at
MIT. The original German/Yiddish expression referred to
someone so inept as to make furniture with an axe, but
somehow the meaning has been twisted so that it now
generally connotes someone obsessed with programming and
computers but possessing a fair degree of skill and
competence.
The word "panoply" derives from a compound Greek word, "pan" = "all" and "hoply," from the "hoplite" or "armed soldier" of ancient times. Hence, the original idea behind the word is that of being "fully (or heavily) armed."
yes.
Words are defined by their usage... even if the original meaning was different (or even opposite) to to current usage.
"Hacker" has come to primarily mean #1 ... only a small subset of technical people and academics still use it like #2. Similar to the way "Begs the question" has changed in the last few years to mean "directly leads to us asking".
Mac OS X has an excellent dictionary app, highlight any word, and from the app menu select Services -> Look Up in Dictionary. Even works when you're offline :-)
Seems to me this used to be bound to a keyboard shortcut back in the NEXTSTEP OS, though it's possible to add one in the current Mac OS.
It looks like it's generated from statistics plus a language model plus the contents of the web (possibly and/or google books).
If that's the goal it looks like they're doing some great work. If being a dictionary is the goal it looks like there are currently better solutions.
However a) give it a few years and b) if they're able to extract that amount of information from their corpus, just imagine how that could be applied to a search engine - I get the feeling that they're showing their hand a little in their progress on the natural language processing front.
If that's so then I can't wait to see them apply it to search.
Clean interface and ability to save favorite words, nice but after a few tests i'm not too confident in the quality of the translation (e.g. some related phrases with eng<->ita are just wrong). A good start,btw.
You could always get this exact functionality by searching for "define: word". But still, I like that they have a wrapper interface now.
For times when my word choice matters greatly I still refer to the Oxford English Dictionary, however. As someone else noted, there's a far cry between Google Dictionary and a hand-compiled one.
I recommend taking a look at http://www.wordnik.com. It's a startup launched by an experienced dictionary editor (sorry, Erin, I don't know what else to refer to the profession as:)) and they have an API as well.
That's great! I've usually used answers.com or dictionary.com, but they're slow and cluttered compared to this. Also, answers.com often gives you a Wikipedia entry when you want a simple dictionary definition.
how is this cluttered when there is basically one drop down, one text input, and one button. Go to homepage of answers.com and they got a bunch of crap on it.
The interface is uniform, but the quality is highly variable. There are some excellent electronics dictionaries on the market, but generally not for free on the web.
But, a query of [define:WORD] only shows 'web definitions' for WORD. It doesn't show these new dictionary definitions, and it doesn't even include the handy top-right-header link to dictionary definitions that a normal query does!
i can't help but wonder, if anyone else except from me was using it for at least last few weeks? otherwise, it means i had breaking news at hands without realizing it :(
What Google would be extremely good at is creating corpora for all these languages. An example of an excellent Spanish corpus is the following: http://www.corpusdelespanol.org/x.asp