Dictionary of American Regional English

One of the most useful things any research program in any field can do is provide a resource to other researchers. The Dictionary of American Regional English is a rich linguistic resource decades in the making, and it is now available online. 

Here's a description from the project's About page:

The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) is a multi-volume reference work that documents words, phrases, and pronunciations that vary from one place to another place across the United States. 

Challenging the popular notion that our language has been "homogenized" by the media and our mobile population, DARE demonstrates that there are many thousands of differences that characterize the dialect regions of the U.S. 

DARE is based on face-to-face interviews carried out in all 50 states between 1965 and 1970 and on a comprehensive collection of written materials (diaries, letters, novels, histories, biographies, newspapers, government documents, etc.) that cover our history from the colonial period to the present. 

The entries in DARE include regional pronunciations, variant forms, some etymologies, and regional and social distributions of the words and phrases.
A striking feature of DARE is its inclusion in the text of the Dictionary of selected maps that show where words were found in the 1,002 communities investigated during the fieldwork.

Regex Dictionary

Nice one! A web-based dictionary you can search with regular expressions (HT MetaFilter). from the site's introduction page:

The Regex Dictionary is a searchable online dictionary, based on The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edition, that returns matches based on strings —defined here as a series of characters and metacharacters— rather than on whole words, while optionally grouping results by their part of speech. For example, a search for "cat" will return any words that include the string "cat", optionally grouped according to gramatical category:

    * Adjectives: catastrophic, delicate, eye-catching, etc.
    * Adverbs: marcato, staccato, etc.
    * Nouns: scat, category, vacation, etc.
    * Verbs: cater, complicate, etc.

In other words, the Regex Dictionary searches for words based on how they are spelled; it can find:

    * adjectives ending in ly (197; ex.: homely)
    * words ending in the suffix ship (89)
          o Adjectives (1, midship)
          o Nouns (80; ex.: membership)
          o Suffixes (1, -ship)
          o Verbs (6; ex.: worship)
    * words, not counting proper nouns, that have six consecutive consonants, including y (79; ex.: strychnine)
    * words, not counting proper nouns, that have six consecutive consonants, not counting y (2; ex.: latchstring)
    * words of 12 or more letters that consist entirely of alternate consonants and vowels (45; ex.: legitimatize)

Google Words

TechCrunch reviews Google's newish dictionary app here (Google's dictionary has been lurking around for awhile, but now it gets its own page here). I did a quick comparison of Google & Merriam Webster's entries for inappropriate and found they were remarkably different in scope. Google returns a lot more data (plus they provided links to other web definitions, which seemed to mostly be Wordnet links). I prefer Google's phonetic guide as it seems to be straight IPA (although their transcription of -pro- as pr'oʊ seems odd to me as it suggests a diphthong when I think they're just indicating rounding, but I never was much of a phoneticist, so no biggie).

I was particularly impressed to see some constructional patterns listed in Google entries (e.g., |'it' v-link ADJ to-inf| representing something like 'it is inappropriate to yell').

However, Miriam Webster still wins on historical data, minimal as it is.

What Is a Word?

(picture definition of the "word" zazen)

The nature of a word's meaning has been an Achilles Heel, stumbling linguistics for hundreds of years. For example, Pāṇini's 4th Century Sanskrit grammar Astadhyayi (Aṣṭādhyāyī - अष्टाध्यायी) appears to have accepted that "the authority of the popular usage of words … must supersede the authority of the meaning dependent on derivation. The meanings of words (the relations between word and meaning) are also established by popular usage" (more here).

The Urban Dictionary is a great example of this kind of approach to dictionary making and now The Photographic Dictionary is trying to use pictures to define words (HT: Daily Dish). It's an interesting project, linguistically as well as artistically. I doubt these pics have been normed for their "meaning" (to be fair, it's more of an art project than linguistic research), but it's a good move towards functional definitions of words. I'd prefer to see multiple pictures (and videos??) for each word that have been normed to some extent for the meanings they are supposed to represent. For example, when I looked at the picture definition for the "word" zazen (above), a word I had never seen before, I did not feel that one picture helped me understand the meaning of the word. If anything, it confused me because I could imagine any number of conflicting meanings associated with that one pitcures. No one meaning was salient. This is classic function/structuralist linguistics. Cognitive semantics grew out of exactly this kind of problem.

And, for the record, my answer to the question in this post's title is this: I have no idea. See Princeton's Construction Site for more on my confusion.