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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?

#51

Post by mmjaa »

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 want exactly the opposite - to be able to construct dictionaries where there are no words used in definitions that don't also have their own entries. To me this is a key feature of a dictionary - definition completeness.

And its one of the reasons I'd like to know about the toolset used to construct dictionaries - I'd give anything to be able to throw a word set at these tools, have a custom dictionary constructed from it, and repeat until unity...

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

#52

Post by mmjaa »

WalterGR wrote: post #50
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?

I'd really prefer something not web-based, but if you know of any tool like this, I'm all ears anyway. What I'd really want is to be able to construct lexicographic sets and save the in SQLite databases, for use in apps of course - but that may be a tall order. You know of tools like this?

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

#53

Post by bloak »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #28
forapurpose wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I couldn't disagree more strongly. I use it to learn the meanings of words and there is no better source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16461549

If you want to know the meaning of words hundreds of years in the past, the OED is a good choice. That question is relevant to almost no one. If you want the current meaning, the OED is a poor choice.

I'd disagree with "almost no one". Lots of people still read books and texts that were composed in the past - it's even compulsory at school - and lots of people have a hobbyist interest in etymology. If I look a word up in a smaller dictionary than the OED I usually find it doesn't tell me anything I didn't already know, or it just raises questions that send me to the OED anyway. Of course you wouldn't use the OED to look up a technical term. Wikipedia would be better for that.

What I really love about the OED is how it keeps getting better even in its coverage of old words. There are lots of words which ten or twenty years ago had the etymology given us "unknown" but which now have a detailed explanation, thanks to recent research. (If you want an example, I think the word "koala" is one.)

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

#54

Post by Nition »

mmjaa wrote: post #51
Nition wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 want exactly the opposite - to be able to construct dictionaries where there are no words used in definitions that don't also have their own entries. To me this is a key feature of a dictionary - definition completeness. And its one of the reasons I'd like to know about the toolset used to construct dictionaries - I'd give anything to be able to throw a word set at these tools, have a custom dictionary constructed…

I actually assumed that was already a general rule, because any word I've ever cross referenced in a dictionary has always been there. In fact, in the diminutive "Little" Oxford[1] there are few enough words available for definitions that you can get stuck in a loop between two words! Although there's always at least one other synonym word in the definitions.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Little-Oxford-English-Dictionary/dp/B...

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

#55

Post by Symbiote »

forapurpose wrote: post #14

There is nothing that compares to the OED if you are serious about knowledge. Knowledge obviously depends heavily on language, but of course language is nebulously defined: The same word means different things to different people and in different places and times. The OED uniquely solves this problem through an unbelievable amount of scholarship into each word's range of meanings, providing incredible breadth and dep…

> grokking

1. Understand (something) intuitively or by empathy.

Origin: 1960s: a word invented by Robert Heinlein (1907–88), American author.

I knew the word, but I'm pleased to discover the origin.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/grok

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

#56

Post by donquichotte »

walterbell wrote: post #34
kragen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't, no! Which scan did he use? I've added that to my comment.

There is contact info on his page: http://www.theabsolute.net/dictionaries/

So it's from 1888? I'm anispeptic, phrasmotic, and even compunctuous to see if "contrafibularities" is already in there.

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

#57

Post by Barjak »

drb91 wrote: post #7

I’d pay hundreds of dollars for a version of OED that shipped in a well-defined sqlite database. I’d even pay for updates.

I just published a repository that de-obfuscates the archive from OED's Windows CD-ROM version. I don't know anything about the markup language it uses and I don't know anything about JSON either, but I attempt to parse it and convert it to JSON.

Sadly, the archive only contains 300,000 words IIRC.

It's just "OED_unpack_tools.py" on github.

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

#58

Post by dogma1138 »

nkurz wrote: post #39
dogma1138 wrote: post #38

OED is a standard for most of not all English as a Second Language or English as a Foreign Language classes from as early as the first or second grade world wide (depending on the country) this alone pretty mush keeps it in circulation since it’s essentially a companion text book.

Either you come from somewhere with extraordinarily talented elementary school students, or you are confusing the OED with a different similarly named work, perhaps the something from here https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/ ? The OED that's being referred to here is a 20+ volume set that costs about a thousand dollars: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-english-d... . University libraries wil…

I didn’t realize that this is only about the full “encyclopedia britanica” version of the OED but Oxford has multiple editions of OED like OED for schools and OED for advanced learners which most students around the world use.

http://www.oed.com/staticfiles/oedtoday2/oxford_and_the_dict...

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

#59

Post by kragen »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #49
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…

I'm flattered! I'll come back to publishing soon, possibly pseudonymously.

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

#60

Post by kragen »

donquichotte wrote: post #56
walterbell wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is contact info on his page: http://www.theabsolute.net/dictionaries/

So it's from 1888? I'm anispeptic, phrasmotic, and even compunctuous to see if "contrafibularities" is already in there.

Only the first volume is from 1888. It took almost 40 years to finish the rest of the work, publishing it in fascicles for beta testing.
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