The Phrontistery
Thursday, 3 February 2005 08:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eNow here is a strange place: http://phrontistery.info
It is a dictionary of obscure and rare words. Could be useful...
I found it when I wanted to check my spelling of the word Ouroboros (an ancient symbol of infinity, closed-systems, paradox, and recursion -- a snake eating its own tail). I looked in my paper dictionaries. Nothing. I Googled for several possible spellings and turned up all of them. That was not much help. I used OneLook Dictionary search http://www.onelook.com to search 992 online dictionaries. Using asterisks as wildcards for the parts of the word I was unsure of, our*b*r*s, I turned up 4 results:
1. our miss brooks
2. our object in writing you is
3. ouroboros
4. ourobouros
The first two are coincidental matches with phrases. The last two are the ones I wanted.
Number 3 takes us to the Wikipedia. I love Wikipedia! It is a free, noncommercial, cooperative project by thousands (millions?) of people to build an online encyclopedia. Its growth has been phenomenal!
Number 4 surprised me by taking me to The Phrontistery which I had never heard of before. It appears to be the altruistic, non-commercial work of one word-obsessed person.
Interesting what cooperation and altruism can do. Isn't the internet a wonderful place?
It is a dictionary of obscure and rare words. Could be useful...
I found it when I wanted to check my spelling of the word Ouroboros (an ancient symbol of infinity, closed-systems, paradox, and recursion -- a snake eating its own tail). I looked in my paper dictionaries. Nothing. I Googled for several possible spellings and turned up all of them. That was not much help. I used OneLook Dictionary search http://www.onelook.com to search 992 online dictionaries. Using asterisks as wildcards for the parts of the word I was unsure of, our*b*r*s, I turned up 4 results:
1. our miss brooks
2. our object in writing you is
3. ouroboros
4. ourobouros
The first two are coincidental matches with phrases. The last two are the ones I wanted.
Number 3 takes us to the Wikipedia. I love Wikipedia! It is a free, noncommercial, cooperative project by thousands (millions?) of people to build an online encyclopedia. Its growth has been phenomenal!
Number 4 surprised me by taking me to The Phrontistery which I had never heard of before. It appears to be the altruistic, non-commercial work of one word-obsessed person.
Interesting what cooperation and altruism can do. Isn't the internet a wonderful place?
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no subject
Date: 2005-02-03 12:51 am (UTC)And....
Date: 2005-02-03 12:55 am (UTC)The Internet, a wonderful and small place, after all. :P
no subject
Date: 2005-02-04 02:55 am (UTC)Here are some other nice links that I use:
The Internet archive (http://www.archive.org) you will find the wayback machine there. Ever found a very cool site in your wanderings and gone back a year or two later to be dismayed that it no longer exists. Check the Internet Archive. It may have been picked up by its web-bots and saved.
WhatIs.com (http://whatis.techtarget.com) technical encyclopedia about computers and the internet.
VisionEngineer (http://www.visionengineer.com) engineering and technology encyclopedia.
The Perseus Library (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu) - and encyclopedia of history. I think it started with ancient Greek and Roman history and widened from there.
The Gnu English Dictionary (http://www.ibiblio.org/webster/). This dictionary is written in XML and is freely downloadable so that you can use it without having to go online. At 13MB though not many will do so. Also XML doesn't display without extra info on how to display it as html. (I never understood why people bothered with XML. Why not just write it in html?)
WordReference (http://www.wordreference.com) - a translating dictionary for English, French, Italian, and Spanish.
English - Latin translation. (http://catholic.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookdown.pl)
The Weather Underground (http://www.wunderground.com) finds out the weather anywhere in the world. (It looks chilly in USA at the moment. Glad I'm in Sunny AU.)
Public records database (http://www.searchsystems.net/)
CIA maps (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/mapspub/) they have released to the public.
CIA publications (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/index.html) Their very informative World Factbook is available here for free download. One day, after the fetish for secrets is gone and we no longer need spooks, these people will be some the most valued compilers of data about our world.
Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.net/index.shtml) You can also get current and past CIA World Factbooks here too, along with more than 15,000 other free ebooks.
Baen Books (http://www.baen.com) A most enlightened publisher -- books both free and for sale.
OK. That is enough to scratch the surface. :)