been stored in a machine-readable form, e.g. on punched tape, magnetic tape or disc' ... found that only single-word translations were given for word forms with more than ...... 'On the Computability of Certain Monsters in Noah's Ark: Using.
16. Dictionaries in electronic form Hilary Nesi in: Cowie, A. P. (ed) The Oxford History of English Lexicography Oxford: Oxford University Press 458-478 (2008)
16.1 Introduction The term Electronic dictionary can be used to refer to any data collection in electronic form concerned with the spelling, meaning or use of words. Although this broad definition can be taken to include machine-readable databases used by language researchers, and glossaries, translators, and spell-checkers incorporated into educational or office software, this chapter will focus on the history of more complete lexical reference tools, and particularly on monolingual or bilingual dictionaries intended for use by English speakers― whether natives or foreign learners. It will consider electronic learners’ dictionaries accessible via hand-held mobile devices, laptop or desktop computers, and the internet.
16.2 The early use of computers in lexicography Computers were first employed in lexicography in the 1960s. As associate editor of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1966) Laurence Urdang designed a database system to categorise and sort units of dictionary information (for which he coined the term ‘dataset’). Definitions could thus be extracted according to subject field, and alphabetical ordering could be achieved automatically, freeing lexicographers to work from a thematic perspective (Urdang, 1966; Logan, 1991; Cowie 1999: 120). Computer typesetting was still in its infancy, however, and the final electronic version had to be keyed in from a paper version rather than being transferred directly to the printer (Logan, 1991: 351; Kilgarriff 2006: 785). At around
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the same time the Lexicographic Project at System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, California, were creating magnetic tape versions of the paper-based Webster’s 7th New Collegiate Dictionary and the New Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary (Olney et al. 1967, Revard 1968). Machine-readable dictionary texts were used for research into natural language processing (Markowitz et al. 1986), although in time it became clear that traditional dictionaries did not contain enough information to make adequate lexical databases for this purpose (Zaenen 2002). Advances in technology in the 1970s encouraged a more extensive use of computers in lexicographical projects. Computer-based compilation systems were employed to sort and check entries in both the first Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) (1978), perhaps the first truly computerized dictionary, widely distributed to universities and research centres for use as a resource for lexical studies ( FONTENELLE) and in the first edition of the Collins English Dictionary (1979), which was particularly notable for its improved page layout, achieved through innovative use of computerized typesetting in place of conventional hot metal or film printing methods (Kilgarriff 2006: 786). Corpus lexicography began in the early 1980s, with the inauguration of the COBUILD project (Sinclair 1987) ( MOON) eventually leading to the publication of the Collins COBUILD English Dictionary in 1987. Lexicographic information in machine-readable form became increasingly available to lexicographers and researchers. Dodd (1989: 85) names the Diccionario de la Lengua Española (1984) as ‘probably the last large European dictionary to be completed using exclusively the traditional methods of handwritten slips and letterpress composition and printing’, and at the 1981 symposium ‘Lexicography in the Electronic Age’ it was claimed that ‘at some point in the production―at the
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composing and proofreading stage―practically all books and other texts will have been stored in a machine-readable form, e.g. on punched tape, magnetic tape or disc’ (Norling Christensen 1982: 213). The use of computers in the process of book preparation had huge implications for dictionary publishers, who could revise, modernize and combine dictionary material more quickly and easily than ever before, but, as Hartmann pointed out at the same symposium, it had little impact on ordinary dictionary users. According to Hartmann ‘most of these have had no experience of the sort of gadgets we have talked about, nor are they likely to have the opportunity in the foreseeable future to benefit from them’ (Hartmann 1982: 255). As it happened, the first attempts to provide users with reference material in electronic form were made not by the dictionary publishing houses, but by the designers and suppliers of consumer electronics.
16.3 Handheld electronic dictionaries Early electronics companies had begun working on the development of handheld gadgets for use in business and the sciences at around the same time as computers were first being used to support dictionary compilation. Kay’s concept of the Dynabook (1968), envisaged as ‘a portable interactive personal computer, as accessible as a book’ (Kay and Goldberg 1977, Wilson 2001) was the forerunner of the modern personal digital assistant (PDA). This took many years to develop, however, and was preceded by the first commercial hand-held electronic calculator, the Canon Pocketronic, in 1970/1971, and Hewlett-Packard's HP-65 calculator in 1974, the first calculator with removable storage. The Xerox NoteTaker, a suitcasesized portable computer based on the Dynabook design, appeared in 1976 (Koblentz 2005).
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The first electronic ‘dictionaries’ with interfaces designed for human users were an offshoot of calculator and PDA technology, and became available in 1978. These were the LK-3000 produced by the Lexicon Corporation, Florida (the rights were acquired by Nixdorf (now Siemens) in 1979), the Craig M100 produced by the Craig Corporation, Japan, and Speak & Spell, an educational toy produced by Texas Instruments. The LK-3000, also known as the Lexicon, was designed in 1976 and patented in 1979 as an ‘electronic dictionary and language interpreter’ (US patent number 4158236). Housed in a small (159x102 mm) case, it had a 33-button keyboard and a 16-character screen to display equivalencies between words in English and a number of other languages (initially French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish). The language translation facilities (one or two thousand words for each language) were sold separately in removable cartridges. Garfield (1979: 277) complained that the Lexicon wordlists had not been compiled with reference to frequency, and that it lacked ‘some of the most obvious and necessary words’. He also found that only single-word translations were given for word forms with more than one meaning, such as watch (both noun and verb were translated as montre in French). Nevertheless Garfield thought the Lexicon a ‘marvellous technological feat’ (1979: 279), and according to Koblentz (2005: 6) the device was selected as the official translation tool for the 1980 Olympics, and was considered so powerful that it was used by the US National Security Agency as the basis for developing a handheld encryption tool. The Craig M100, launched shortly after the Lexicon in 1978, had a similar design but ‘a wider, more complete vocabulary than the Lexicon’ and the ability to translate to and from three languages simultaneously (Garfield 1979: 277). About 200,000 Lexicon and Craig translators were sold worldwide in 1979 (Garfield 1980: 574).
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While the LK-3000 and the Craig M100 matched translation equivalents, Speak & Spell drew on new developments in computer-based speech synthesis to link lexical input to speech data. The first text-to-speech system for English had been created in Japan in 1968, and had been further developed at the Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s (Klatt 1987: 757). In 1976 the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the blind had put the technology to practical use (Klatt 1987: 756) and, recognizing the potential of speech synthesis for language learning, Texas Instruments went on to design Speak & Spell, a toy to help children learn commonly misspelled words. Speak & Spell had a 40-button keyboard and an eight-character display screen. Ten different cartridge libraries were available, each containing about a thousand words at various levels of difficulty, from basic function words to homonyms. The words were stored in the same way that a calculator stores numbers, processed through an integrated circuit model of the human vocal tract, and pronounced in standard American English (Woerner 2001, Maxey 2006). Texas Instruments went on to produce Speak & Spell models for the French, German, Spanish and British English markets, and also Speak & Read (first appearing in 1980), which used an electronic voice and programmed activities to help children build their reading skills. Speak & Read had eight different cartridge libraries, to practice about a thousand lexical items from basic rhyming words (at level one) to silent letter combinations (at level three) (Woerner 2001). Speak & Spell became a design classic, and versions continued to be produced until 1992. The Speak & Spell automated voice featured in electronic dance music of the 1980s, and the device appeared in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) as the toy that E.T. adapted to ‘phone home’ (Woerner 2001). Texas Instruments used Speak & Spell speech synthesis technology when it moved into the market for handheld translating devices in 1979. The Language Tutor
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(renamed the Language Translator the following year) translated between several European languages but was technically identical to Speak & Spell, although it retailed at a much higher price. A cheaper version without the speaker, called the Language Teacher, was introduced in 1980 (Woerner 2001). Each language module for the Language Tutor was sold separately, with no cross-referencing between modules and quite a limited range of lexical items. The French/English module, for example, stored 360 individual words and 78 phrases that could be spoken and displayed, and an additional 239 words which appeared on screen but were not pronounced. The Language Translator was closely followed by other speaking translators produced by Sharp Electronics and Matsushita Electric, the parent company of Panasonic (Berger 1979), and in the 1980s other major electronics companies such as Casio, Franklin and Seiko also began developing speaking dictionaries. Cator (1983: 197) observed that ‘manufacturers from vending machines to automobiles are literally racing each other to produce the first integrated speech synthesizers in their products’. Other advances in the 1980s included the development of spell-checking functions, first used in text-processing systems such as IBM Displaywriter, launched in 1980 (IBM Archives, undated), and SpellStar, an add-on to MicroPro’s popular WordStar word processing program. In 1986 Franklin Electronic Publishers produced the SA-88 Spelling Ace, billed as ‘the world's first portable spell checker’. The Spelling Ace was a word list rather than a dictionary, but it recognised many erroneous ‘phonetic’ spellings (such as g-e-r-a-f for giraffe) and for spell-checking purposes this gave it an obvious advantage over paper-based dictionaries. With the success of this product Franklin moved out of the desktop computer business to concentrate on handheld electronic devices. It still produces Spelling Ace (now with an additional thesaurus
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function and games, exercises and study list creation features) as part of its sizeable current range of electronic reference products including children’s dictionaries, speaking dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries and ‘travel translators’. Although handheld dictionary technology continued to improve, drawing on new developments in graphical gaming devices such as those featured in Nintendo’s GameBoy (a handheld console launched in 1989), capacity was still relatively limited. Manufacturers began exploring additional means of storing dictionary information, on removable IC (Integrated Circuit) cards, which had been developed at Honeywell Bull in the 1970s, and on CD-ROMs, launched by Philips and Sony in 1984. Small (8cm) CD-ROMs were used to store reference works for the Sony Data Discman, a development of the Dynabook concept with a 10-line LCD screen, first marketed in Japan in 1990. The more powerful Sony Bookman which came out in 1992 used cartridges to store texts, and nowadays its descendent the eBookman, a palm-sized PDA, stores some lexicographical material on memory cards but offers many additional electronic dictionaries for download from the internet. Titles for the modern eBookman (produced by Franklin since 1995) include dictionaries in the Oxford, Merriam-Webster, Collins GEM and Klett-Pons series. Sharpe (1995) provides an overview of the range of electronic dictionary types available in Japan in the mid 1990s. He identifies six broad categories:
A
portable handheld dictionaries, which could be as small as a bank card or a pocket calculator, with data held on IC cards. Some of these offered audio pronunciation (via headphones)
B
electronic notebooks, ‘an expanded version of A offering extra-linguistic functions’
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C
CD-ROM dictionaries, with either 12cm disks to use with a desktop computer, or 8cm disks to use with a portable electronic book such as the Data Discman or Datapress (National Panasonic)
D
dictionary software for use on a desktop computer
E
dictionaries on floppy disc to use with an electronic notebook, such as the Toshiba Xtend PN10. These had a smaller storage capacity than dictionaries of types C and D but data could be transferred from the notebook to a compatible PC
F
a dictionary in a small desk-top device linked to a handheld OCR scanner. The user could input the search word via a keyboard, or scan it in
The Canon Wordtank IDX-7500 (1993) is described in particular detail by Sharpe. This was a popular type-A dictionary which could be opened like a book, ‘about the size of two cigarette packets’, with a 9cm by 4cm screen and a 16Mb memory capacity. This device contained three interconnected dictionaries (Japanese-English, English-Japanese and kanji-Japanese), a last look-up recall function, and a ‘Word Memo’ mode to record and test word knowledge. It was also possible to expand the database by adding extra IC cards containing lexical and language information such as example sentences, synonyms and antonyms, or lists of business terms. Bolinger (1990: 145) predicted that the ‘hand-held computer’ would eventually supersede dictionaries in the traditional book format. This prediction was quite daring at the time, as the manufacturers seemed to be more concerned with technological innovation than with lexicographical information, and on the whole handheld electronic dictionaries had escaped the attention of metalexicographers. When reviewed at all, evaluations tended to be negative. Sharpe (1995: 48), for example,
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complained that most handheld electronic dictionaries in Japan did not expand much on the content of their printed sources, despite the potential of IC cards to store a much greater range of grammatical and lexical information. Taylor and Chan found that only 28% of handheld electronic devices they surveyed at the City Polytechnic of Hong Kong provided examples of word use, in addition to direct Chinese-English translation (1994: 600). The twelve Hong Kong teachers they interviewed preferred their students to use printed dictionaries. Similarly, Koren (1997) reported that Israeli schools rejected electronic dictionaries as a matter of policy, because most of them did not contain ‘types of information such as varieties of word meanings, word families, parts of speech, tense, usage and idioms, etc.’ Taylor and Chan also reported that in 1992 the Hong Kong consumer council had filed 30 complaints about handheld electronic dictionaries, relating to such faults as inaccurate spelling, poor pronunciation, and limited vocabulary. However, as the technology became more sophisticated, as respected publishing houses produced more electronic publications which could be made available for download, and as the memory size of handheld devices increased, the traditional divide between the dictionary in a mobile device (intended for quick reference in practical contexts) and the academic dictionary (prized for the quality of its lexicographic information) began to disappear. Electronics companies gradually began to purchase licenses for established lexicographical products, such as Collins COBUILD, Longman and Oxford dictionaries, adding to these resources the benefits derived from the latest technical inventions. The electronic licensing partner list for Oxford University Press, for example, now includes AOnePro, Canon, Casio, Franklin, Seiko, Sharp and Sony (for handheld electronic dictionaries and PDAs),
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Enfour (for internet-enabled mobile phones) and C-Pen and WizCom (for reading pens). Yagi and Nakanishi (2003) distinguish between the first generation ‘partial content’ electronic translators, which only installed a small proportion of the headwords and definitions contained in a printed dictionary source, and the second generation ‘full content’ devices, which provided the full texts of published print dictionaries, including example sentences. According to Nakamura (2003: 346) Seiko Instruments was the first company to produce a second generation device. The Seiko TR-700, published in 1982, enabled users to search the entire contents of an English-Japanese Dictionary, a Japanese-English Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus. Seiko later manufactured the first monolingual English learners’ dictionary to appear in the handheld electronic format, the Hand-Held Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1995), based on the second edition of LDOCE, although this was only marketed in Japan. Developments in compression and decompression technology have since made it possible to store and integrate an ever larger quantity of fullcontent dictionaries. The Seiko SR-T6500, for example, produced in 2003, contained nine full-text dictionaries despite being only a third of the size and weight of the old TR-700 (Nakamura 2003: 346). Nakamura reports on the trend towards integrating as many as thirty dictionaries in one device, with a ‘jump function’ that allows users to highlight an unknown word in a definition in one dictionary, and jump to another dictionary to look up the meaning. ‘This kind of function makes it easier for English learners to access English-English dictionaries, because of the instantaneousness and accessibility of the other bilingual dictionaries’ (Nakamura 2003: 349). Nowadays many handheld electronic dictionaries offer natural-sounding voice simulation, pronunciation of extended text, and speech recognition to translate
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between languages. The most recent, such as the Besta CyberDict VIII, also include video sequences for English language learning, and stylus and touch panel handwriting recognition (the system ‘learns’ to respond to the user’s individual handwriting style). The latest speech recognition facilities are a step towards Crystal’s ‘ideal lexicographical world’ (1986:79), where a database is addressed through a voice-activated terminal. The usefulness of Sobkowiak’s proposed phonetic-access dictionary ‘beyond the year 2000’ (1994: 509), in which ‘the isolated spoken word is looked up directly in a phonetically transcribed lexicon’ has been queried by metalexicographers such as Koren (1997) because success depends on the user’s ability to pronounce the search word correctly. Current handheld dictionary manufacturers try to turn this difficulty to their advantage, however. Ectaco advertises its Partner EC800 ‘talking dictionary’ by pointing out that speech recognition enables users to practise their pronunciation skills: ‘Test your pronunciation by trying to speak out a phrase in the foreign language and see if the Partner understands you. If it does, then everyone else would understand your speech too!’ A further development in hand-held dictionary technology has been the so-called ‘reading’ pen. Fuji Xerox first marketed Hyper Synony, a bilingual English-Japanese electronic dictionary with scanning capability, in 1992 (Sharpe 1995: 41). This early device was about the size of a modern laptop and was wired up to a separate handheld scanner, but in the late 1990s the Israeli company WizCom Technologies developed a pen-shaped dictionary which scanned words on the page and showed their most common translations or definitions on an integral screen. The first WizCom reading pen was marketed in Europe in 1997 (Koren 1997), and was shortly followed by the C-Pen, a similar product developed by a Swedish company (C Technologies AB 1999; Bergeron 2001). WizCom’s QuickLink and Quicktionary pens and the C-Pen
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continue to be developed and are sold in a number of different versions, some of which are able to store and retrieve previous search words, read scanned text and definitions aloud, and transfer scanned text directly to PC or PDA applications. Wizcom’s Quicktionary II Genius, for example, launched by Taishukan Publishing Company in Japan in 2003, contained the Genius English-Japanese Dictionary (third edition) and offered users the choice of condensed and expanded formats of each dictionary entry: ‘the option of viewing a quick explanation or full definition of any scanned word’ (Wizcom 2003a). The English Reading Pen, targeted at users with reading disabilities and launched in London in 2003, contained the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (COD) (tenth edition), and had a ‘test mode’ feature to block dictionary access during exams, while permitting the user to scan words and hear them spoken aloud (Wizcom 2003b). The Wizcom SuperPen Professional Complete English Dictionary Pen (2006) offers the texts of nine Houghton Mifflin reference works (such as the Office Edition of the fourth American Heritage Dictionary,), has text-to-speech capability, and can capture, store and transfer up to 1,000 pages of printed text. Despite these huge increases in capability, the small dimensions of the handheld computer screen still mean that the user cannot see the full range of information available in a longer dictionary entry without scrolling down the page, and can rarely view a number of entries simultaneously. There have been big improvements in this respect: first generation Casio dictionaries could display only 2 lines, with only 12 characters per line, but by 2003 some models could display up to 52 characters per line, and up to 17 lines of scrolling text (Yagi and Nakanishi 2003). In 2003, however, Casio was still aiming ‘to overcome its disadvantage of less information at a glance compared with the conventional printed dictionary’ (Yagi and Nakanishi 2003: 344).
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Some recent handheld dictionaries have five-inch screens, but any further increase in size would severely limit portability. The Sharp PW-C8000 (2004) appears to be unique in offering the option to connect to a television set to view its reference material, but this may not be the ideal display mode for most dictionary users, who are probably more inclined to consult their dictionaries while reading and writing at their computers than when sitting in front of their TVs.
16.4 Dictionaries on disc Teachers have generally preferred the dictionary on disc to the handheld device. Handheld devices are designed for private use; they are relatively expensive and are generally purchased by individuals rather than the educational institutions. Discs, on the other hand, can be manufactured cheaply, and under site licence the dictionary content can be installed on many different machines, or distributed via a local area network. Moreover the computer screen is large enough to enable several students (and their teacher) to view and discuss a dictionary entry together, a feature that Guillot and Kenning (1994) appreciated when trialling the Robert Éléctronique in class. In the 1980s the price of hardware fell dramatically and there was an urgent need for good-quality educational software to use with microcomputers in schools and universities. Educators such as Shaw (1981: 181), for example, lamented the lack of computer-based materials for UK schools, specifying that: ‘programs must be portable and well-documented so that they can be readily installed on a variety of computers’. Dictionaries on disc met this requirement, and the storage medium appealed to publishers because it enabled them to develop, describe and market their
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electronic dictionaries independently of the electronic goods manufacturers, on the basis of the quality of the lexicography rather than any gadgetry. A few dictionaries were published on 3.5” floppy, such as the Collins English Dictionary (1991), the Longman Dictionary of American English for Microsoft Windows (1994) and the Electronic Oxford Wordpower Dictionary (1995), but the CD-ROM was generally the disc format of choice, because of its capacity (a 12 cm CD-ROM could hold about 150,000 print pages). The most important lexicographical work to be transferred to disc was the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) ( WEINER). A CD-ROM of the 12-volume 1928 edition appeared in 1988 (Kaye 1989, Milic 1990) and this was followed by a CD-ROM of the 20-volume second edition (1989) in 1992, updated in 1999 and again in 2002. The original transfer process was described by Jackson (2002: 57) as a ‘massive undertaking, involving collaboration between the International Computaprint Corporation in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, the University of Waterloo in Canada, IBM United Kingdom Ltd and Oxford University Press’. The typeface was of too uneven quality to be scanned, so that more than 120 people were employed to key in text, with 50 more to check their work. Search routes through the first OED on CD-ROM were facilitated by recent developments in hypertext applications (Stubbs 1985, Raymond and Tompa 1988). Dictionaries have an inherent hypertextual structure and they are intended to be read non-sequentially, following routes dependent on the user’s consultation needs, so hypertext proved to be an ideal way to navigate lexicographical data. It permitted the user to jump from one part of a publication to another, and (in later publications) to jump between reference works, or between a dictionary and whatever online text(s) the user was reading or writing at the time. Having been manually compiled, however,
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the OED posed some hypertext linking problems. The volumes had originally been created in alphabetical order, and there were more cross-references in the later volumes than in the early volumes, because compilers ‘were more likely to crossreference existing entries than the still uncompiled ones’ (Raymond and Tompa 1988: 875). It turned out to be much easier to create interfaces for electronic versions of more recent print-based dictionaries, thanks to the computer-assisted compilation methods that had been developed in the 1960s and 1970s. Many more monolingual native-speaker English language dictionaries appeared on CD-ROM in the 1990s, including The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, third edition (1992), Webster’s New World College Dictionary, third edition (1994), The Chambers Dictionary (1994), Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, second edition (1996), Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, tenth edition (1996), Infopedia UK (1996) and COD (ninth edition 1997; tenth edition 1999). Jackson (2002: 70) describes the range of search functions available for these dictionaries, from the simplest which simply linked the search word and the relevant entry (as in Infopedia UK), to the more sophisticated which offered the option to search the full dictionary text, and employ wildcards and Boolean operators (as in COD9 and 10). As with many second generation handheld electronic dictionaries, Infopedia UK offered limited search facilities but a wide range of sources, being a compendium of the Longman Dictionary of the English Language, the Bloomsbury Thesaurus, and various encyclopaedic reference works, together with photographs, audio clips, video sequences and maps. At the other end of the scale COD9 and 10 contained only the text of COD, but at least offered complex full-text searches. Jackson notes however, that COD9 was a more sophisticated tool for lexical research than the COD10, produced two years later. This was because the earlier version
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included ‘filters’ to limit the full text search to headwords, definitions, idioms, phrasal verbs or etymology, thus making it possible, for example, to search for groups of words such as all the phrasal verbs formed with up as their adverbial particle (Jackson 2002: 71). COD10 introduced a ‘quick search’ facility which enabled users to call up dictionary entries by double clicking on words in an on-screen text. This idea was developed further by Oxford University Press and other dictionary publishers through the adoption of iFinger, a search and presentation engine. Once the dictionary was installed on the user’s hard drive the iFinger software enabled a pop-up window to appear whenever a word was typed into the input field box, or whenever the cursor was moved over the word on a web page or in any Windows-based program. iFinger technology became a feature of many dictionaries on CD-ROM, including the PONS Lexiface bilingual dictionary series, the Prisma Digitaal Woordenboek bilingual dictionary series, the Merriam-Webster series and the Pop-up New Oxford Dictionary of English on CD-ROM (2001). It has also functioned in multiple title packages such as the Oxford Pop-up Reference Shelf on CD-ROM (2000) and the Oxford World English Dictionary Shelf on CD-ROM (2002). With iFinger searches can take place across multiple reference works at once, with the results presented in a single window. Another lexicographical tool, BOOKcase, gave access to external programs, such as internet search engines, and also integrated separate but complementary electronic reference works, allowing several to be open at the same time. BOOKcase has been used to provide joint access to a number of dictionaries, including those in the Routledge bilingual Technical Dictionary series (Quervel 1998; Croese 1998), the Cambridge International Dictionary of English on CD-ROM (2000) and the Cambridge Learners’ Dictionary on CD-ROM (2001) (Tsai 2002), and also the
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Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD) on CD-ROM (2000) and the Oxford Guide to British and American Culture on CD-ROM (1999) (Rizo-Rodriguez 2004: 40). The first English learners’ dictionary on CD-ROM was the Longman Interactive English Dictionary (LIED) in 1993. This was followed by Collins COBUILD on CDROM in 1995 and the Longman Interactive American Dictionary (LIAD) in 1997. All three were compilations of earlier print-based sources. LIED was made up of four volumes: the Longman Dictionary of Language and Culture, a dictionary of common errors, a pronunciation dictionary and an English grammar. The COBUILD and LIAD CD-ROMs each contained three volumes: a dictionary, an English grammar, and a usage guide (in the case of COBUILD) or a dictionary of common errors (in the case of LIAD). LIED and LIAD also provided audio files and a series of mini dramas on video, and Collins COBUILD on CD-ROM included a previously unpublished Word Bank of five million words. In each case the component volumes were crossreferenced to each other, and when consulting one component the user might be directed to additional information about meaning, pronunciation, grammar or use to be found in the companion sources. Cross-referencing was often problematic, however, because the printed books, which had originally been created independently of one another, had different numbering systems, different cross-referencing systems, and different levels of coverage of the same words (Nesi 1996). As Seedhouse (1997) comments of Collins Cobuild on CD-ROM, ‘the rationale ... seems to have been roughly “Stick all the products we already have on a cd-rom and let’s hope somebody can find a use for it”.’ These first monolingual learners’ dictionaries on CD-ROM were very experimental; the innovations were exciting but the defects were many, especially as
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far as cross-referencing was concerned. Some publishers opted for a simpler format after this disappointing phase: Collins COBUILD edict (1998) lacked the earlier grammar and usage components and did not include the Word Bank, and the first learners’ dictionaries on CD-ROM from Oxford University Press, the Oxford Interactive Wordpower Dictionary (1998) and OALD5 and 6 (1995 and 2000), were single title publications. Newcomers to the market, the Cambridge International Dictionary of English on CD-ROM (2000) and the Macmillan English Dictionary (MEDAL) on CD-ROM (2002), were also based on single print-based sources. Longman continued with multi-title products, however, producing an updated version of LIED in 2000 and combining LDOCE with the Longman Language Activator in 2003. Collins COBUILD III on CD-ROM reintroduced the earlier COBUILD characteristics in 2001, adding a concordancer to enable searches of the Word Bank. Two recent products, the Phrasebuilder Genie (2004) and the Oxford Compass (2005) combine OALD material with other titles: the Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English in the Phrasebuilder Genie and the Oxford Guide to British and American Culture in the Oxford Compass. As noted by Jackson (2002: 141), monolingual learners’ dictionaries on CD-ROM have tended to exploit the potential of the electronic medium more extensively than native speaker dictionaries. Rizo-Rodriguez (2004: 39) lists some of their characteristic features:
Advanced search modes with wildcards, Boolean operators, filters, and in some cases a thesaurus function (see, for example, the Cambridge International Dictionary of English on CD-ROM (2000) as described by Tsai 2002)
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Internal links to word processing applications and other computer software, allowing users to copy text from dictionary to document
Access to a pop-up dictionary window from the text, and, more recently, ‘intelligent look-up’, whereby the software selects an appropriate dictionary entry on the basis of linguistic clues (see, for example, the Oxford Advanced Genie (2002), and the Oxford Phrasebuilder Genie (2003) as described by Tsai (2004))
The possibility of cutting, pasting and printing dictionary material
Instant look-up of words in dictionary definitions and examples, by clicking on them on the screen
Dictionary annotation features (see, for example, MEDAL on CD-ROM, 2002)
Audio recordings of headwords, and in some cases the opportunity for users to record and replay their own pronunciations
A ‘history’ function, that enables users to review the results of previous searches
‘Banks’ of text (as in the COBUILD CD-ROMs) or of phrases and examples (as in LDOCE4)
Options to show or hide entry features, so that more or less information is revealed.
Pedagogical extras such as games, exercises, illustrations and video
Perhaps the most interesting of these developments is the provision of new search modes, enabling many of the ‘fuzzy matching’ search types envisioned by Dodd (1989: 89). Dodd had foreseen that electronic dictionaries of the future might allow users to find a word which:
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‘sounds like A’ ‘rhymes with B’ ‘is spelt like C’ ‘has an etymology of D’ ‘dates from year/century E’ ‘is used in the style of F’ ‘is used in technical field G’ ‘is an antonym of H’ ‘is a synonym of I’ ‘is a hyponym of J’ ‘is a superordinate of K’ ‘includes the word(s) L in its definition’ ‘is of grammatical class M’ and ‘has syntactic valency or pattern N’.
Phonetic transcription to search for headwords (Dodd’s search route A) first became possible with the ‘Sound Search’ facility in the MEDAL CD-ROM (2002) and Macmillan Essential Dictionary for Learners of English CD-ROM (2003), but even the earliest monolingual learners’ dictionaries on CD-ROM provided wildcards to help with search routes A, B and C. The first LIED and COBUILD CD-ROMs also provided lists of homophone pairs, and for some searches in LIED a ‘Spelling Note’ box appeared, suggesting alternative initial letters for search words. Etymological information (Dodd’s search route D) was first included in the LDOCE CD-ROM
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(2003), followed by the Oxford Compass (2005), but a route that had some of the characteristics of Dodd’s ‘dates from year/century E’ was available to users of the first LIED and LIAD through date searches for people listed in the encyclopaedic dictionaries of Language and Culture. More elaborate searches for style, register, antonyms, synonyms, hyponyms, superordinates, word classes and valency patterns (Dodd's routes F, G, H, I, J, K, M and N) could be conducted in many of the early CD-ROM dictionaries by means of filtered searches: Geography, Subject Specialism, Register, Word Class and Word Class Subcategory in the OALD CD-ROM (1997), for example, and Headword, Inflections, Meaning, Examples, Grammar, Synonyms, Antonyms, Superordinates, Phrases and Derived Words in Collins COBUILD on CDROM (1995). Search route L (‘includes the word(s) L in its definition’) could also be achieved in many dictionaries by conducting a full text search. These features helped to recommend CD-ROMs for educational and library use before the advent of the internet. The market for dictionaries on CD-ROM for personal use, however, was always an uncertain one. Harley (2000: 85) noted that sales of electronic dictionaries were ‘rather modest’, and reported that CD-ROM dictionaries had ‘hardly taken off in a big way’. The new technology also turned out to be expensive in terms of customer support; according to Gillen (1995) additional technical advice of some sort was requested for 10%-30% of all CD-ROM products sold. The practice of bundling a CD-ROM with another related product was one way of ensuring distribution. An electronic reference work was sometimes included as an apparently free addition to the print version, as was the case with the 1993 edition of the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, noted by Wooldridge (2004). Alternatively it could be bundled with other software or computer hardware, like Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia on CD-ROM in the 1990s, and the bilingual
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English-Chinese dictionary Kingsoft Powerword, published by Peking University Press (also known as the Jin Shan Ci Ba). Although Kingsoft Powerword is full of errors, due largely to the inconsistent quality of its source dictionaries (Zhang 2004), it is probably the most widely used CD-ROM dictionary in the world (eight million copies were distributed between 1997 and 2002, according to the Kingsoft website (2006)). The practice of bundling continues, and a CD-ROM accompanies many new dictionary editions. Improved technology, however, has also made it possible to download dictionary material directly from the internet to a PC or PDA, without the need to purchase a CD-ROM.
16.5 Dictionaries on the Internet The first proposal for the World Wide Web was made in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, but the Internet only became a valid storage medium for electronic dictionaries in 1993, when CERN gave up the right to charge royalties for World Wide Web documents. Initially publishing houses that had invested heavily in dictionary development were unwilling to distribute their products in this way, because internet services were usually provided free of charge, and little was done to guard against copyright infringement. Carr (1997: 210) commented on the irony of the fact that ‘the pioneers in computerised editing and CD-ROM books are struggling against their technologies spreading onto the Net’. Because of this, although by 1998 there were about 400 English dictionaries on the World Wide Web (Li 1998: 21), many early online reference works such as the Hypertext Webster Interface had, according to Carr (1997) ‘an obscure copyright
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status’, or no named hard-copy source. Others, such as the 1911 edition of Roget’s Thesaurus and the 1913 edition of Webster's Dictionary, were too old to be copyright protected. Docherty (2000) describes cases of dictionary plagiarism; a small (unnamed) company in Turkey, for example, simply keyed in an English-Turkish dictionary published by Langenscheidt and placed it on the internet. The only differences between the online version and the original were the typing errors that had crept into the plagiarized copy. Storrer and Freese (1996) and Carr (1997) record the opportunity for ‘one-stop’ simultaneous searches of such reference sources, using free internet dictionary search engines such as OneLook, founded in 1996, or the Free Online Lexicon and Encyclopedia (FILE), available in 1997. Usage of the Free Online Lexicon and Encyclopedia between October 1997 and January 1998 was reported on the website of its creators, the DICT Development Group (DICT.org, 1999). During this four-month period the DICT group’s servers answered approximately 3.1 million requests (over 1000/hour), but 0.86 million of these were for words that were not found in any of the databases―some obviously misspellings, but others searches of common words that were simply not defined in the freely available online dictionaries at the time. The DICT Development Group also noted that some of its users had found entries from the 1913 Webster’s Dictionary to be ‘offensive or politically incorrect’, although the group was understandably wary of acting on this information: ‘we do not want to take on the task of editing or updating existing databases’. Storrer and Freese (1996) commented on the unreliability of public domain on-line dictionaries as compared to dictionaries in book form; arguing that nobody took responsibility for the accuracy of the information which internet dictionaries provided, and that both the web addresses and the page contents were constantly changing.
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Whereas only 188 dictionaries were indexed with OneLook in 1997, by 2005 this number had grown to 992 (Li 2005: 16), and included not only the more dubious sources, but also a number of highly-regarded publications such as the Cambridge International Dictionary of English (indexed in 2002), The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (indexed in 2003), Encarta World English Dictionary (indexed in 2003), Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, tenth edition (indexed in 2003), and the Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English (indexed in 2004). The variable quality of online dictionaries compromised the effectiveness of one-stop searches, however, because ‘all the search data are shown in long lists, results from trustworthy sources and downright amateurish concoctions all mixed up’ (de Schryver 2003: 157). The expansion of internet dictionary resources was partially due to advances in technology. Initially, connections were too slow to provide multimedia applications such as headword pronunciations, although these were already available for many dictionaries on CD-ROM and in handheld devices. Also, in the early days of the internet, lines became overloaded if a website proved very popular; an online version of the Collins COBUILD Student's Dictionary which was made freely available in 1998 by the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Hoelter and Wilkens 1998) had to be withdrawn in 2004 ‘due to excessive usage’ (Li 2005). The growing use of high speed broadband technology in the early 2000s put an end to this sort of problem for many users in the developed world. According to Madden (2003: 5) 6% of American home internet users had broadband in 2000, rising to 25% in December 2002 and 31% in August 2003. The increased number of good quality dictionaries available on the World Wide Web was also partly due to a change in policy on the part of publishers, who started
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charging for their online products or treated their web dictionaries as marketing tools ‘to entice the user to buy a book, CD, or electronic access to text’ (Landau 2001: 96). In 1999 Oxford University Press launched the Oxford English Dictionary Online, available by subscription, and this was followed by Oxford Reference Online: the Core Collection in 2002, a subscription service which enabled simultaneous searches of one hundred Oxford dictionaries and reference works. On the other hand, although MEDAL (2002) was only made accessible online to those who could prove that they had bought a copy of the dictionary in book form, on the whole the producers of learners’ dictionaries have tended to offer their products for free, but with slightly less functionality than on the purchasable CD-ROM. Cambridge Dictionaries Online, a ‘no frills’ service launched in 1999, aimed to encourage users to upgrade to the Cambridge International Dictionary of English on CD-ROM (Harley 2000). (In 2006 Cambridge added an Online Extra service with audio files, usage notes, study pages and more elaborate search facilities for paying subscribers.) Similarly OALD7 is only available online without the additional features offered in the Compass CD-ROM which is bundled with the print version, and the online LDOCE (2006) provides fewer audio pronunciations for headwords and example sentences than LDOCE on CDROM. Online dictionaries also attract users to publisher’s sites where other activities and products are on display; these might include news items, ‘word of the day’ or ‘word of the month’ features, lists of the most frequently looked-up words, teaching and learning materials, and, of course, information about how to buy the publisher’s products. Even if web-based dictionaries lack multimedia files and complex search routes, websites can be more easily revised and augmented, and some online dictionaries claim to offer wider and more up-to-date coverage than that provided in other
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dictionary formats. In some cases revision has been facilitated by ‘bottom-up lexicography’, a procedure noted by Carr (1997) whereby dictionary sites invite their users to participate in the dictionary-making process, either as equal contributors or by making suggestions to an editorial board. The ‘Quick Definitions’ section of the Onelook dictionary site, for example, claims to draw on ‘the hundreds of usersubmitted additions and corrections we've received over the years’. Similarly, the DICT Development Group (1999) asked its users to solve the problem of missing or objectionable entries in the databases of the Free Online Lexicon and Encyclopedia by submitting to the Group their own updated definitions, and the first version of the Cambridge International Dictionaries Online (1999) provided users with a contribution form to type in any search word not already listed, its meaning, and an example sentence (Nesi 1999). The same sort of facility was offered by Heinle’s Newbury House Online Dictionary, also launched in 1999 (Peterson 1999). The Collins Word Exchange (2004) goes one step further, by letting not only the Collins editors but also users themselves decide whether or not to publish suggested changes in the Collins Living Dictionary (Dean 2005). Jeremy Butterfield, editor-in-chief of Collins dictionaries, likens the Living Dictionary to Wikipedia (Moss 2004). The Living Dictionary is not completely collaborative, however, because it employs lexicographers to write definitions, even though it allows the general public to decide on some matters of content. Wikipedia, founded by Jimmy Wales in 2001, belongs to another tradition of online reference work, and grew out of ideas conceived in collaborative web-based communities such as Everything, and Keith Golden’s Wordbot Collaborative Dictionary site, both now defunct. In these communities everyone had equal editorial rights, a philosophy explained on the Wordbot information page: ‘if everyone contributes just a little, then
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everyone will gain a lot’ (Nesi 2000: 142). Wikipedia and Wiktionary, the companion online dictionary, were able to improve on earlier collaborative sites because of the invention of wiki (originally Quickweb) software, which allows ‘everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site’ (Leuf and Cunningham 2002). The first ever wiki site was created in 1995, and the software became available in the early 2000s as an open source tool. The first Wiktionary (aiming to describe all the words of all languages) was written in English in 2002, and similar Wiktionaries have now been created in other languages, along the same lines. According to a recent article in The New Yorker (Schiff 2006) Wikipedia is now the seventeenth most popular site on the Internet. There has been much debate concerning its authority (see, for example, BBC News online for 15 December 2005 and 9 February 2006) but it is generally conceded that the entries are more up-to-date and no more error-prone than those in professionally compiled encyclopedias, albeit not so well written. Wiktionary has been less successful in attracting media attention but appears to share some of the same strengths and weaknesses as Wikipedia. Writing before the first Wiktionary site was underway, Docherty (2000: 68) argued that ‘uncontrolled authorship can be extremely dangerous if the user is seeking quality and reliability’. de Schryver (2003: 160) also dismissed bottom-up collaborative editing as ‘of little scientific value’ because of its lack of quality control. Admirers of Wikipedia and Wiktionary argue that there are a sufficient number of contributors and readers to prevent any serious errors from remaining on the sites for long, but Wiktionary entries do vary greatly in style and range of content, and although it is useful as a means of recording expressions that are too ephemeral or too localized to justify publication in a mainstream dictionary, contributions are undated and unsourced, making it difficult to track neologisms (and desuetude).
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16.6 Developing dictionary forms Whereas in the early days of the internet the transfer was from older print dictionaries to the web, nowadays publishers turn to the internet for language data to inform new dictionaries in book form (Ross 2003). Dictionary entries on screen are looking less like dictionary entries on the page; pop-up windows often resemble PDA screens, and lexicographers are also making use of non-static display functions such as the ‘threedimension search’, where related dictionary entries are ‘graphically depicted in a kind of web of words spreading out from a central item’ (Rizo-Rodriguez 2004: 40). Electronic dictionaries are inclined to hybridisation, combining alphabetic and thematic groupings, and mixing monolingual and bilingual, lexical and encyclopaedic information, in the manner described by Hartmann (2005). The same or a similar electronic dictionary product is also often made available in two or three different formats: on the internet, on CD-ROM, and downloadable to memory card for use with a PDA. The most recent developments in technology have led to the use of mobile or cellular (cell) phones for lexicographical purposes. In 2002, for example, Enfour, a Tokyobased company, launched Tango Town, described as a ‘life style tool’ combining a multilingual dictionary engine with educational and cultural material for English speakers living in Japan. Tango Town enables cell phone users to subscribe to dictionary information via the internet, as in the new era predicted by de Schryver (2003:150), when there will be ‘widespread and generalised full access to the internet (and thus also to internet dictionaries) from handheld, wireless electronic devices’. Most recently, the cell phone has also been made to function like a reading pen. The first commercial cameraphone was introduced in 2000, and now 3GVision's Scanning
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Dictionary (2006) provides a downloadable application which can scan words and display them on the cameraphone, with dictionary information beneath. The advertisers invite users to ‘float the camera over a word and get its translation. Move around from word to word and watch the different meanings appear on the screen’. Most technological innovations were envisaged by metalexicographers well before they actually materialized on a webpage, computer disc or handheld device. Pop up windows were predicted by Kay in 1983, in anticipation of the iFinger software and other similar dictionary presentation tools, and voice-activated searches were predicted by Crystal in 1986, foreshadowing speech recognition facilities in the latest hand-held devices. Zgusta (1991) wrote of the possibility of representing actions and processes visually in an electronic dictionary. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s CDROM Dictionary (2000) did just this, with video sequences to illustrate over eighty verbs such as flick, shrug, and sneer (de Schryver 2003: 165). Improvements to the audio component of electronic dictionaries have been proposed by researchers such as Perry (1997), and the audio presentation of headwords and even usage examples has now spread from handheld dictionaries to CD-ROMs to web-based dictionaries. Landau (2001) hoped for speech translation, and it is now a feature of several handheld dictionary models such as those in Ectaco’s Talking Translator series. Similarly, innovative access routes to dictionary information were envisaged and discussed long before they became available. The thematic organization of lexical data (standard practice in paper-based thesauruses and lexicons) was strongly advocated by McArthur in 1986, before the electronic format enabled complex searches for groups of words containing the same phonological, syntactic or semantic features. In 1989, at a time when the options offered by the OED on CD-ROM were still limited to searching independent entry fields, Dodd anticipated a range of
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electronic dictionary search routes, many of which are now in widespread use. Dodd anticipated the use of sound effects to clarify the meaning of onomatopoeic words, an idea realized in 2003 by both the Macmillan Essential Dictionary and LDOCE on CD-ROM. He also imagined future dictionary users as ‘clients’, selecting lexicographical information via an online database, as is happening with the introduction of services such as Tango Town. Electronic dictionaries continue to offer opportunities for both lexicographical and technological innovation. As we have seen, lexicographical ideas can sometimes be constrained by the limitations of the technology, while the technology can also forge ahead with scant regard for lexicographical content. However, even if the two fields have not proceeded perfectly in tandem, much ground has been covered in thirty years, with an ever-increasing pace of change.
Dictionaries and other reference works The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th edition 2000) The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (3rd edition 1992) Bloomsbury Thesaurus (1997) Cambridge International Dictionary of English (1995) Chambers Dictionary (1994) Collins English Dictionary (1979) Collins COBUILD English Dictionary, (1st edition 1987, 2nd edition 1995) Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary (3rd edition 2001, 4th edition 2003) Collins COBUILD Student's Dictionary (1990) Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English (2nd edition 2001, revised 2003) Concise Oxford Dictionary (9th edition 1997, 10th edition 1999). Diccionario de la Lengua Española (20th edition 1984) Encarta World English Dictionary (1st edition 1999)
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Genius English-Japanese Dictionary, Taishukan Publishing Co., Ltd. (3rd edition 2001) Longman Dictionary of the English Language (2nd edition 1991) Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1st edition 1978, 2nd edition 1987, 3rd edition 1995, 4th edition 2003) Longman Dictionary of Language and Culture (1st edition 1992) Longman Language Activator (1993) Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (1st edition 2002) Macmillan Essential Dictionary for Learners of English (2003) Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (5th edition 1995, 6th edition 2000) Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English (2002) Oxford English Dictionary (1st edition 1928, 2nd edition 1989) Oxford Guide to British and American Culture (2000) Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary (10th edition 1996) New Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary (1964) Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1st edition 1966) Random House Unabridged Dictionary (2nd edition 1993) Webster’s New World College Dictionary (3rd edition 1994) Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (2nd edition 1996)
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