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Why I built a dictionary app

wordnote.app

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Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#91

Post by cal85 »

This looks great, congratulations to the author. I will be using it.

In case you’ve never read it, this 2014 blog post is an all time favourite of mine. It really opened up my thinking about words and definitions:

You’re probably using the wrong dictionary - http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary

Ever since reading that, I have tended to use the 1913 Webster’s as my primary dictionary, supplemented by various modern ones where necessary. I found an acceptable iOS app for it - the UI is not good, but at least it has those shimmering definitions.

My dream would be if you could make a version of Wordnote that uses 1913 Webster’s as a dataset.

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#93

Post by wonderbore »

jxramos wrote: post #53

> Noise Free It's incredible how many distractions this kind of app usually has: extra clicks, unnecessary features, rectangular ads, and too many typography styles. I very much like this adaptation of the term noise. I’m starting to realize a growing angst against intrusive noisy products that present junk to me I did not ask for. I realize there’s a non-zero cognitive load to ads and variable UI that’s unrelated to…

From my experience, either an app reaches momentum and the author wants to monetize it or it was last updated 4 years ago.

Non-monetized good apps are few and far between. One of which is actually related, by thai-language.com: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/thai-english-dictionary-tl/id7...

It's clean, it has whole sentences mixed in the vocabulary, it links phrases parts to their sub-definitions, and lets you paste a whole sentence at once, defining word by word.

One of my favorite apps. Updated 5 months ago.

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#94

Post by mathieuh »

dionidium wrote: post #49
prawn wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very stupid, but I check dictionary definitions in an incognito window because I'm horrified of someday people coming across my browser history and thinking "Wow, he didn't know the definition of that ?! What an idiot!" The idea of a dictionary that tracks my searches horrifies me in a silly way. Ha!

I look up words for which I already know the primary definition all the time. Sometimes it's just to confirm that it doesn't mean something subtly different than I remember. Sometimes it's to find alternate/secondary uses. Sometimes it's to confirm spelling. Sometimes it's a jumping off point for synonyms or related words. I wouldn't assume you were totally unfamiliar with a word just because you looked it up.

I do this all the time to look up pronunciations. I'm interested in linguistics so I taught myself IPA, and with things like stress being pretty unpredictable in English, while I might know the meaning of a word I like to make sure I'm pronouncing it correctly

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#95

Post by steinso »

jiggunjer wrote: post #92

I hate typing on mobiles, so wouldn't it be cool if the app could use the camera to look at the text and just tap to highlight/lookup a word? Voice lookups might also be a good thing.

Great idea! Turns out, this already works natively on iPhones already from the camera.

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#96

Post by Tildey »

jiggunjer wrote: post #92

I hate typing on mobiles, so wouldn't it be cool if the app could use the camera to look at the text and just tap to highlight/lookup a word? Voice lookups might also be a good thing.

More recent iPhones can do OCR into (any?) text fields - hold on the text field and select "scan text" or the little box with some horizontal lines in it. It's not perfect for some things (underscores and more unusual punctuation) but it's usually correct

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#97

Post by interpol_p »

gumby wrote: post #21
kccqzy wrote: post #2

Actually, iOS already has built-in support for dictionary and thesaurus. In any native text input field, select a word and choose Define or Look Up. The choice of dictionary is customizable; I usually choose New Oxford American Dictionary and Oxford Dictionary of English (not to be confused with the venerable Oxford English Dictionary). They are high quality dictionaries. They are basically the same except that the p…

Also in the Mac since the original OS X beta…iirc it was in the NeXT too.

This was the feature that sold me on Mac OS X in 2003 or so. Having an operating system where I could get the dictionary definition of any word in any input field, or web browser, or piece of UI just by mousing-over it and hitting ctrl+command+D

I was a Windows user at the time and the _consistency_ of this dictionary lookup throughout the UI just blew me away

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#98

Post by Forricide »

The flashcards feature of this makes it seem super useful for language learning. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to support non-English languages? At least on iOS, the OS has built-in dictionary support for a huge variety of languages. It would be super cool to see something just like this app, but with support for more languages, perhaps through the OS's dictionary (although I'm not sure if iOS makes that available to apps)

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#99

Post by herewulf »

banana_giraffe wrote: post #40
CharlesW wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I wonder why they didn’t just download it from https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiktionary/ per https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Help:FAQ .

The source they used (freeDictionary) does all of the work of parsing wiktionary and giving you simple json object for each word. (It actually started life as a way to get the definitions out of Google's "define:" operator, but it seems those days are over) It also, turns requests for some words, like "rolling" into definitions for their root word like "roll", even when wiktionary has distinct and useful definitions…

Turning "rolling" into "roll" is something a stemmer does. I'd imagine there are a number of JavaScript libraries readily available for this.

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#100

Post by nicbou »

jxramos wrote: post #53

> Noise Free It's incredible how many distractions this kind of app usually has: extra clicks, unnecessary features, rectangular ads, and too many typography styles. I very much like this adaptation of the term noise. I’m starting to realize a growing angst against intrusive noisy products that present junk to me I did not ask for. I realize there’s a non-zero cognitive load to ads and variable UI that’s unrelated to…

I use ad blocker rules to cut out a lot of that noise. I found the internet impossible to use without it. I have stopped using apps because they bypass those rules.

The worst ones are suggested content feeds. They're everywhere, including in your operating system.

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