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Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

theguardian.com

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Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#41

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

kragen wrote: post #23

The OED can not only survive the internet; it will flourish on the internet. We can incorporate the entire thing into Wiktionary, which, as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16461656 points out, is already in some ways more comprehensive and reliable. Unfortunately, for copyright reasons, we have to go back to its first edition, and even the last volume of the first edition might still be in copyright. I announced…

I'm assuming the 2nd edn. OED I downloaded from https://web.archive.org/web/20170805001549/http://download.h... for my ereader is of dubious copyright status?

Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#42

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

pm215 wrote: post #29
eulevik wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your library may provide access to members. For example, State Library of New South Wales.

Yes. Most UK libraries have a setup so that their members can use the online OED from anywhere on the internet (you just have to enter your library card number). It uses cookies so you don't have to log in every time you want to look up a word, so the user-experience can be very convenient. I have a firefox keyword search shortcut for it.

I'm fortunate in that my (US) University has a subscription, but unlucky in that they have a poorly implemented 2-factor authentication for EVERYthing connected to the University, whose cookies disappear after 12 hours.

Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#43

Post by haZard_OS »

Nition wrote: post #10
mmjaa wrote: post #4

I'd rather like to have a service that allows me to construct my own dictionaries. There have got to be some standard OpenSource/GNU-like tools that give a budding lexicographer the things they need to construct dictionaries - does anyone know what these tools are, and how effective they are at creating custom dictionaries?

One thing I always wanted was a paper dictionary that excluded the really common words. It'd be a lot faster to look up thaumaturge if I didn't have to sift through the likes of that and the . Take say the 5000 most common words in English and leave them out. Sure on rare occasions you'd look up something that was left out, but that already happens in the other direction (towards rare words) because that and the are…

I know this isn't exactly what you meant but I have found it surprisingly useful (and fun!):

https://www.amazon.com/Thinkers-Thesaurus-Sophisticated-Alte...

Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#44

Post by thaumasiotes »

shullbitt0r wrote: post #32
thaumasiotes wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know many people will say that they can get a dictionary for free, why use the OED. The problem is that those who know better are not standing up to assert why it is superior, necessary, and incredibly valuable to the world. There are a couple of problems with this. First, the OED is primarily a work of historical scholarship. Anyone in the market for a dictionary so that they can look up the meanings of words wo…

Because that's cheating! I'm half kidding but you are arguing about price, mainly. Not why the cheaper (free?) content is lacking. You could also just afford a personal teacher and taken to the extreme, a personal translator so you wouldn't need to learn the language at all, which would be cheating. Except that you might have a personal desire to speak the language. What's the problem with Chinese that free offerings…

> It's not that your coeds were being cheap, perhaps, it could just be disappointment for something as basic to cost anything at all

Dictionaries are not basic in the slightest. I'm constantly frustrated that the state of the art in Chinese/English dictionaries is still not very good.

Here's an example. The Mandarin word for "protect" is 保护 bǎohù. As a matter of semantics, protecting involves three roles: (1) the protector; (2) the beneficiary; (3) a danger to be warded off. In English, (1) is marked by being the subject of the verb protect, (2) is marked by being the object, and (3) is optionally marked by being the object of a complementary prepositional phrase headed by from: in

    1E. I will protect her from going hungry.
role (1) is "I", role (2) is "her", and role (3) is "going hungry".

A quality dictionary will include all of that information if you look up protect. But the state of the art in Chinese/English dictionaries is to note that 保护 is a verb, that it means "protect", and to provide a few example sentences, none of which feature role (3) at all. I had to ask a Chinese person how to indicate the danger involved in protecting, which it turns out is marked by an entire complementary clause:

    1Z: 我保护她免挨饿 wǒ bǎohù tā miǎn ái'è
Translating the syntax directly into English, this is something like "I protect her to avoid going hungry". There is no possible way of learning the correct usage of 保护 from a Chinese/English dictionary at the moment, as none of them saw fit to include this information. You're certainly not going to get there by analogy to English.

Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#46

Post by dragonwriter »

Nition wrote: post #37
my_first_acct wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to someone on Stack Exchange, quoting the NY Times, quoting the Chief Editor of the OED [1], 'there are for the verb-form alone of “run” no fewer than 645 meanings'. Other common words with huge numbers of meanings include "put" and "set". [1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42480/words-with...

And I'm sure some of those are obscure meanings, but the likelihood is I'm never going to look them up. Exclude those many definitions of "run" and either make the dictionary a bit smaller (easier to search) or include several rare word definitions in the same space.

Removing a handful of thousands of common words won't make the OED noticeably shorter, and it's not space constrained anyway.

And I don't think a rare use of a common word is any less likely to be looked up than a rare word.

Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#47

Post by dragonwriter »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #21
forapurpose wrote: post #17

There's a well-known narrative that before the Internet, for all of human history, information was scarce and humans found ways to adapt; and since the Internet, information has been overwhelming and humans must find different ways to adapt. What is disappointing to me is that, with so many more options, people have not adapted by utilizing only the best information. Anyone can read the best sources (with a major exc…

> I know many people will say that they can get a dictionary for free, why use the OED. The problem is that those who know better are not standing up to assert why it is superior, necessary, and incredibly valuable to the world. There are a couple of problems with this. First, the OED is primarily a work of historical scholarship. Anyone in the market for a dictionary so that they can look up the meanings of words wo…

> First, the OED is primarily a work of historical scholarship. Anyone in the market for a dictionary so that they can look up the meanings of words would be better off getting something else, like Merriam-Webster or really anything. The OED is not a good choice for this purpose

The OED is excellent for this purpose, due to its completeness, and other, even “unabridged” dictionaries fall far short of it in this use.

Of course, you have to a pretty particular needs in words to look up to be frequently hitting the space where the OED is needed for this.

Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#48

Post by Nition »

dragonwriter wrote: post #46
Nition wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'm sure some of those are obscure meanings, but the likelihood is I'm never going to look them up. Exclude those many definitions of "run" and either make the dictionary a bit smaller (easier to search) or include several rare word definitions in the same space.

Removing a handful of thousands of common words won't make the OED noticeably shorter, and it's not space constrained anyway. And I don't think a rare use of a common word is any less likely to be looked up than a rare word.

I don't mean the full OED. Personally I have a Pocket Oxford and a Concise Oxford. Both are space constrained. The Pocket Oxford in particular has around 60,000 words so leaving out the most common 5-10K would make a noticeable difference. Since it's the complex words that get left out in small dictionaries, as you decrease dictionary size, the size saving that you'd get from removing common words proportionally increases. But you might be right that it wouldn't make enough of a difference, since small dictionaries can also fit less words in total. It might never be enough to matter much.

Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#49

Post by ComputerGuru »

kragen wrote: post #23

The OED can not only survive the internet; it will flourish on the internet. We can incorporate the entire thing into Wiktionary, which, as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16461656 points out, is already in some ways more comprehensive and reliable. Unfortunately, for copyright reasons, we have to go back to its first edition, and even the last volume of the first edition might still be in copyright. I announced…

OCR has come a _long_ way since 2005. I was an early adopter around 2000, and the results scared me away from OCR for thE better part of two decades. I recently revisted it with no special approach, just trying Adobe Acrobat Pro’s OCR module and was very pleasantly surprised with the progress that has been made.

Adobe (and I’m sure many others) now preserve the image but place text behind it in a hidden layer or else use a pseudo ML process to create a font from the scan and fit it to the text with high accuracy (and low binary sizes).

Might be worth revisiting.

Edit: just saw the full mailing list url (on phone, hard to see anything) and realized who I am replying to. Hi! I have missed your writings! I recommend “only a constant factor worse than optimal” all the time to people.

Re: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?

#50

Post by WalterGR »

mmjaa wrote: post #4

I'd rather like to have a service that allows me to construct my own dictionaries. There have got to be some standard OpenSource/GNU-like tools that give a budding lexicographer the things they need to construct dictionaries - does anyone know what these tools are, and how effective they are at creating custom dictionaries?

I'd rather like to have a service that allows me to construct my own dictionaries.

In printed form, or is web-based okay?

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