words

[miriam_e]

I love dictionaries and thesauruses (thesauri?) and own many of them -- all kinds of specialist dictionaries, as well as the more usual general English language dictionaries. I have a few favorite English language dictionaries and generally refer to them first before turning to others.

This morning I was looking for synonyms to literary in my favorite thesaurus, a free ebook downloaded from Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org and came across the word menticulture. I didn't know what it meant. I always try to look up words that I don't understand, but in this case there was a problem: it was marked as obsolete. I looked in my favorite dictionaries and, as I expected, it wasn't there. I was unable to go online to search the net, so I was stuck for a moment until I remembered the GNU free dictionary, which I'd downloaded some time ago. I looked in it and there it was:

Men'ti*cul"tur*al a. Of or pertaining to mental culture; serving to improve or strengthen the mind. [R.]

Sadly the GNU Dictionary project seems to have ended prematurely because, having been created from a 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary, the dictionary misses out on a lot of modern words, and adding new words is a fairly difficult task. It would have been easier if the ebook had been created as ordinary text, or HTML, but during all the recent hype for XML someone decided it would be a great idea to format the dictionary in XML. Unfortunately that renders it almost unusable as nothing seems to actually be able to display it properly. Some time back I began to reformat it in HTML, but stopped about a quarter of the way through when I realised how out of date the dictionary was. However I can now see that this might not be such a drawback, and if it is easy to add entries then the dictionary could even be gradually modernised.

Comments

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Hi. :)
Yep, A friend was visiting at the time, and because I'm waaay out in the country on dialup and my friend was on the phone I was unable to go onto the net. Looking up words is one of those things that if you don't do right now then they are likely to waft out of the mind and not be done later, so I needed to find out then and there.

Heheheh. :) Yes, I used to always have a thesaurus and dictionary when a schoolkid and read them when I didn't have something else to read.

I often get lost while looking up words, because I'll see words which I don't know and read their definitions, often following up on words contained in their definitions. Soon, after branching out on the search several times, carrying me all over the dictionary, I sometimes find I'd forgotten my original target.

I like to joke that the dictionary is a great book with a terrific vocabulary, but a crummy plot.

The thesaurus is an amazing book. Did you know Roget originally wrote it in jail? He'd been locked up for political agitating (I don't know the details), but he decided to make good use of his time by writing a catalogue of all human concepts. He figured the best way to do this is to catalogue the words. He felt this would be really important for humanity. The funny thing is he was right, but for the wrong reasons. Roget's thesaurus is one of the world's most used books simply because it is a terrific way to find words similar or opposite in meaning... mostly to solve that annoying tip-of-the-tongue feeling which plagues every writer on the planet.