Showing posts with label google dictionary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label google dictionary. Show all posts

Friday, December 4, 2009

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.

TV Linguistics - Pronouncify.com and the fictional Princeton Linguistics department

 [reposted from 11/20/10] I spent Thursday night on a plane so I missed 30 Rock and the most linguistics oriented sit-com episode since ...