Google Launches Dictionary, Drops Answers.com 180
ObsessiveMathsFreak writes "Google has expanded its remit once again with the quiet launch of Google Dictionary. Google word search definitions now redirect to Google Dictionary instead of to Google's long term thesaurus goto site, Answers.com, which is expected to take a serious hit in traffic as a result. Dictionary pages are noticeably more plain and faster loading than their Answers.com equivalents, and unusually feature web citations for the definitions of each word. This means that, unlike most dictionaries, Google considers ginormous a word."
Urban Dictionary and so on (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder why I haven't actually seen the snippets of definitions lately. I remember seeing them a few years ago. Not that it would had actually changed a lot - there's always lots of different sites linking to dictionaries on the first page of results.
Urban Dictionary has actually been the most useful one of those.
User ratings, definitions of almost all the weird (and stupid) words teens come up with and usually fun descriptions too.
Now get off my lawn.
Re:Urban Dictionary and so on (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Urban Dictionary and so on (Score:5, Insightful)
It is moderated.
Re:Urban Dictionary and so on (Score:4, Funny)
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It depends though, Urban Dictionary you can usually figure out what a word that someone says really means. Using traditional dictionaries you would think that someone says that someone sucks on a rooster...
It doesn't do much for international relationships either when looking for appropriate words to use. If Colins or websters had their way we'd all be virgins.
(longmans is one of the few that might have a few useful words). On the other hand if you don't learn from a native speaker then you are unlikely to need them anyway.
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The traditional dictionaries you use are poor if the do not cover common and well established slang like that. The OED does, even in the free web version: http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/cock [askoxford.com]
Urban dictionary is useful for slang, but you are somewhat exaggerating things.
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try "applies oral suction to a rooster."
Which would really suck.
Then again, "blow job" doesn't involve any blowing either.
Though I heard tell that Marylin Manson supposedly had some ribs removed so he could blow his own horn.
And no doubt cunnilingus can involve some cunning.
Burma Shave
Re:Urban Dictionary and so on (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with Urban Dictionary is it's filled with crappy non-objective/crackpot definitions: opinions about words, not accurate well-written definitions, and contains definitions that reinforce many common misconceptions,
Example #1: Sugar High [urbandictionary.com]
Example #2: Boogeyman [urbandictionary.com] The scary monster man that gets little kids at night, usually found under the bed or in a dark closet.. Little eric got eaten by the boogeyman when he didn't say his prayer last night.
Example #3: Linux [urbandictionary.com]
Example #4: Windows [urbandictionary.com] A piece of glass you can open when it gets too hot outside. Come on people
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Re:Urban Dictionary and so on (Score:5, Funny)
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Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
Who cares about popups, now we have a standardized scrabble dictionary!
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You mean aside from the actual, official Scrabble dictionary?
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scrabble is more fun when played with the universal dictionary.
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It even counts kwyjibo!
(though the definition would be better if it were a definition, not quoting wikipedia...)
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
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http://www.google.ca/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|en&hl=en&q=functional
But... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:But... (Score:5, Funny)
Agreed, it's perfectly cromulent.
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You're embiggening this thread with that cromulent comment.
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Dude, you can't embiggen an inanimate object. Learn English already, geez.
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Pretty impressive, 'cromulent' does show up...
http://www.google.com/dictionary?langpair=en%7Cen&q=cromulent&hl=en/ [google.com]
* Fine, acceptable or normal; excellent, realistic or authentic ...
* "Lisa the Iconoclast" is the sixteenth episode of The Simpsons' seventh season. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on February 18, 1996. In the episode, Springfield's bicentennial approaches, and Lisa writes an essay on town founder Jebediah Springfield.
As does "embiggen":
* Make bigger
Not to men
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But if you put in "Microsoft" there is no definition: it just says " * microsoft is also a word in: Deutsch"
http://www.google.com/dictionary?langpair=en%7Cen&q=microsoft&hl=en/ [google.com]
If you follow that link to German.
Found in dictionary: German > English. See also: English > German.
Microsoft - noun
1. Microsoft
Apparently no words can accurately describe Microsoft other than its name.
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Any dictionary I have ever seen would consider "ginormous" to be a word.
See the definition of "word" here:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/word [reference.com]
This is one of my favorite asinine party tricks. If someone tells me something isn't a word, I bet them that it is, according to THEIR dictionary. I've never lost this bet. It has the added virtue of verbally pinching the anal retentive word monger right on the nose. :-)
C//
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'Ginormous' is in that gray area between "real" word and slang. But I was really surprised to discover just now that 'humongous' is considered a slang word, according to Miriam-Webster.
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Ginormous is a word, but I'm not sure it is an English word. It has been in the Scots language for many years, certainly for as long as I've been old enough to speak.
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Pattern of sounds with a meaning, last I checked, that was the definition of a word (although, it might have changed...).
so you can call me an idiot if you like, but at least I know you won't refer to me as a ginormous idiot.
Re:But... (Score:5, Funny)
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Ah, but would it be "embiggens" or would it be "ginormousizes"?
I don't care about "most dictionaries"... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I don't care about "most dictionaries"... (Score:4, Informative)
That's really interesting, thanks. The main dictionary (oed.com) is $295/year. I didn't know they had a concise one for free.
And it really is concise. One (really good) definition. Not 37 links, like the Google dictionary.
Not that there's anything wrong with 37 links. But sometimes I just want to want to know the definition of the word.
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$295 is a bargain. It's £750 [oed.com] if you buy it (all 20 volumes) in print! Or £4000 for the leather-bound one.
Sample page (PDF) [oup.com]. It's really not concise, but then it's not supposed to be.
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I've people use it in speech and writing and others generally know what it means, then it's a word. I think even the people who work on the OED have said that dictionaries are descriptive, no prescriptive. The intention is to maintain a catalog of words that are commonly accepted and in use, not to tell you which words are acceptable. Oxford is not the Academie Francaise.
All words are made-up words. There are words that I don't like and words that I think are stupid, and plenty of new words that I hope
Google Dictionary? (Score:2)
Google "Dictionary" is nothing more than a simple aggregation. They take the definitions from other free dictionaries.
So why not just include Answers.Com in the Google Dictionary results?
Re:Google Dictionary? (Score:4, Informative)
On that path madness dwells.
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Oh i was unaware of that, my bad.
Re:Google Dictionary? (Score:5, Funny)
You should've googled it.
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I've used onelook.com [onelook.com] for a while, which is another aggregator that (for now) seems to have more links than Google Dictionary does.
But Google Dictionary isn't just an aggregator, they provide their own pronunciations [gstatic.com] for some words (a really important feature IMHO), and a list of synonyms for some words.
I actually hope that onelook links to Google Dictionary, as strange as an aggregator-linking-to-aggregator might be.
My guess is that Google has been working on computational linguistics for such a long
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"very unhappy"?
Really?
Do you realize you can still use it?
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define:-searches are not redirected (Score:3, Informative)
Doesn't look like it's fully deployed yet. Google searches of the form "define:word" are not redirected to google dictionary yet. Which is a shame. Because that's one hell of an useful way of looking up terms.
why? (Score:5, Interesting)
By doing this, Google may have wrested control over third parties, but has significantly degraded the user experience. Prior to this, each word would have a hyperlink to a definition. Now it appears that one has a link to "definition" for one word. Furthermore, in my sampling the definitions are very basic and not of competitive quality. For instance, the word cricket has for the first definition the sport, the second a slang use, and then finally a first grade definition as an insect. No etymology. No context.
I can only imagine they are doing this to in some way differentiate themselves from Bing, which could also use freeonlinedictionary or the like. Unfortunately for Google, MS has encata, which tends to not have slightly more sophisticated definitions.
Re:why? (Score:4, Interesting)
With webmail combining mail into the web, the web became the Internet. ... --, other websites are left without clicks.
With increasing importance of online/cloud/Live applications and ChromeOS combining applications into the web, the OS becomes just the medium of accessing the Internet.
With Google being the starting point for many people to do their Internet stuff, and Google incorporating more and more steps of that clickpath -- you don't have to leave google for shopping, mail, document editing, site-specific searches, weather information, stock information,
Is Google trying to become the Web? Google is leveraging their, not monopoly, but well-established position.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
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It's by no means perfect but it's probably not complete and with the inclusion of, at the very least, a wikipedia link, I can get a full and detailed definition if required.
Imo, most dictionary sites are ugly and too graphic intensive for a site where people are only interested in words.
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It makes sense that Google wants to do this, and Google generally do good stuff ... but I'm really slowly just starting to feel a bit like, 'OK Google, enough, you don't have to be part of *everything* I try do in life'. Am not saying they've done anything wrong; maybe there really is just a tendency for people to not like one company to get too big.
define: word (Score:2)
Why don't they add the results to "define: word" search in Google?
It will do for now (Score:2)
I speak 4 languages other than English: German, Japanese, Spanish, French and Sign language (ASL) as well. I tested it's translations in all the different languages and it performed fine by my standard except for ASL for obvious reason's.
I liked it.
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Perhaps I'm blind, but I didn't see Japanese in the list.
It's rather odd, as Japanese is supported by Google Translate (and happens to be the fourth most popular language on the Internet).
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Japanese worked fine for me. I was just translating words on the fly in different to see if they came up correctly in English.
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I tested it's translations in all the different languages and it performed fine by my standard except for ASL for obvious reason's.
Based on this sample of English, presumably your native language, I'm going to have to take your opinions on accurate translations with a grain of salt. Actually, make that a crystal of halite. Several kilogram sample.
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I still use paper copies for all languages.just in case. :-)
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So, that's Sign language? I think I speak that, too: 24/f/Burkina Faso.
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Danke.
Doesn't "define:" already work fine? (Score:3, Informative)
is there something I'm missing?
Still needs work (Score:2)
Yeah, so, after looking it up, I still don't know how to say "ginormous". (Not that I plan on using it any time soon anyway.) Their pronunciation guide could stand to also include the guide I've seen in dictionaries for decades, rather than an unnecessary international guide when I'm looking up an English word.
allows users to decide what are words (Score:2)
I hope the dictionary works on a sort of democratic principle, where words are defined by their actual usage.
Dictionary editors understand this, but they just don't update enough to make it work. M-W doesn't have the Simpsons' cromulent [merriam-webster.com], but it has Shakespeare's puke [merriam-webster.com] and Dr. Suess's nerd [merriam-webster.com]. It'd be nice to have a dictionary that evolves as quickly as language.
huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Am I the only one to have the following three reactions?
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Answers.com provides information from lots of other sources too. If you don't believe it, just go take a look...
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I've been using the 'definition' link *very* regularly for many years ... it's been my primary dictionary - Firefox, Ctrl+K, enter word, and click 'definition'.
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This should make the FTC happy (Score:5, Funny)
"We're a monopoly, you say? Sir, the word 'monopoly' is not even in my dictionary." ...in fact, everything from 'marzipan' to 'morass' seems to be missing.
No ginormous? You need a better dictionary (Score:4, Informative)
I'm 35 and was using the word "ginormous" as a kid. Sure enough, it's in the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary [cambridge.org].
Wiktionary.org? (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems no one yet mentioned Wiktionary.org [wiktionary.org]. Over 1 536 000 + in French, a similar number in English. While there's obvious room for improvement, it's generally usable and often useful.
So here's my question, why does Google dives into a new initiative instead of jumping on existing trains? I guess the answers has something to do with control. Google wants to keep the control (which is understandable and not necessarily a bad thing). This Wiktionary-Google Dictionary is not the only example, Google Map Maker [google.com] and OpenStreetMap.org [openstreetmap.org] is another one (both crowdsourcing map data, and yes, OSM was there much before).
Re:Wiktionary.org? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wiktionary.org? (Score:4, Funny)
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It could have just started as some junior level programmer's 20% time and bubbled up from there.
Quietly? (Score:2)
Maybe they rolled it out quietly because, as dictionaries go, this one sucks. It's the only one I've ever seen that defines every word by using that word in a sentence. E.g. for the word "hold", we find:
That's fine for a spelling bee, but in a dictionary, I prefer the more conventional (and more succinct) definition:
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Doesn't work with everything - for instance, I first noticed that they switched when looking up the word comprise [google.com]. It doesn't actually contain a definition, just a number of explanatory sentences and examples:
"If you say that something comprises or is comprised of a number of things or people, you mean it has them as its parts or members."
In fact, try a few words at random and you see this as a general pattern - very few words actually contain any definitions. It's the dictionary for people who don't know h
Where does Google get their definitions? (Score:4, Insightful)
Did they come up with their own definitions for all these words? Did they "scrape" someone else's dictionary? Or pay someone for their content?
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Help! (Score:2)
Where will i find out what EVOO is?
Old? (Score:2)
It looks nice... (Score:2)
It looks great, but I think I'll stick with WordReference.com.
The great thing about Wordreference is not only does it give a definition and shows the word in several sentences in context (especially so in the English to Spanish and Spanish to English dictionaries) is that it has language forums, and posts about words and phrases are also linked from the dictionary lookup.
One thing I'd like from a search engine or dictionary is the ability to look up grammar examples. For example, if I want to see if a certa
Google Defines "Slashdot".... (Score:2, Funny)
o Slashdot, sometimes abbreviated as
o To render a web site slow or unusable via the unusually large number of page requests that result from a link on a very popular web site; To
o The act of self mutilation by an individual addicted to overclocking
Re:When google finally presses the evil button... (Score:5, Funny)
How exactly does a dictionary list non-dictionary words?
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Another word not in there is "poop", synonymous with poo, bot unlisted as another word for faeces.
Compare Google Dictionary's result: http://www.google.co.uk/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en [google.co.uk]|en&hl=en&q=poop
which merely lists poop deck, with Answes.com's: http://www.answers.com/topic/poop [answers.com]
which is comprehensive and exactly what you'd expect from a dictionary.
I'd say Google fails pretty badly on this (relatively childish) example and isn't up to the job (or should that be jobbie).
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Oh great, and slashdot craps all over the google link, presumably because of the pipe character.
Re:When google finally presses the evil button... (Score:5, Informative)
Did you look at the whole page of results from google? It has the excrement definition in the "related phrases" and "web definitions" sections.
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Yeah, I did. What I saw is a bunch of links to other sites that define related phrases.
When i click on a definition link that's on Answers.com, I get what you would expect from a dictionary - a bunch of definitions for the word I was inquiring about. Google Dictionary doesn't do that (in this case) - it gives one single definition out of the many available and then gives me other links to follow for what it calls ' related phrases'. In other words, i have to go to yet more sites to get the definition I was
Re:When google finally presses the evil button... (Score:4, Insightful)
Reach for the tinfoil hat indeed...
The reason they come out with new dictionary versions every year is that new words are added to the dictionary, and sometimes old words are removed, or have their definitions changed. I don't see any reason that online shouldn't also follow this trend, but the advantage to an online format is that the change can happen relatively quickly, once it's accepted by the editor, whereas some people still use decades-old versions of the printed dictionary and don't see a reason to buy a new copy every couple of years.
And there are some *print* dictionaries that include "ginormous" in the list of words. Language, by definition, is fluid. It changes over time, and the dictionary needs to change with it. "Ginormous" is a word that has made it into the popular vernacular, and it has a generally accepted meaning as a portmanteau of the words "giant" and "enormous". As such, it belongs in the dictionary, and it's only a matter of time before the remaining editions of the dictionary add the word. A language isn't defined by the dictionary, but rather, the dictionary is defined by the language. (it's already in the Oxford English Dictionary [askoxford.com] as well as the Collins Dictionary [collinslanguage.com], and Merriam-Webster [m-w.com].)
Obligatory disclaimer: One of my two major fields of study in my undergrad was applied linguistics.
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How much better can the OED really be?
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Given the Age of said Dictionary some folks more or less say
the OED DEFINES THE ENGLISH MEANING EOD == QED
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Not much: the OED, in fact, does have an entry for 'ginormous' -- and the first attestation is from 1948, so I don't think it's as new as some people think.
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I guess it gives different people different results.
Hacker [google.com]
1) a programmer who breaks into computer systems in order to steal or change or destroy information as a form of cyber-terrorism
2) a programmer for whom computing is its own reward; may enjoy the challenge of breaking into other computers but does no harm; "true hackers subscribe to a code of ethics and look down upon crackers"