SWALLOWED A DICTIONARY

Dick Pountain/Wed 16 April 2003/5:22 pm/Idealog 105

I wonder if there's a word for people who are always wondering if there's a word for something: a 'logomaniac' perhaps, or more excitingly, a victim of the dark romantic 'Wortenlust'. Whatever, I'm definitely one of them. I've always loved dictionaries, even before I wrote one myself, and keep a whole shelf of them positioned just behind the sofa I do all my reading on: biographical ones, musical ones, philosophical ones, slang ones, you name it. Not everyone shares my liking of course - to say someone's 'swallowed a dictionary' is de-ro-ga-tor-y (count those five lovely syllables), and people are often as suspicious of those with big vocabularies as those with big fists or bank-balances.

 My ambition is to have a good dictionary small enough to keep with me, rather than lugging the monsters off that shelf, and of course foreign language dictionaries need to be in your pocket to be useful: I already own two little green Hugo Italian/English ones, one beside the telephone, one in the car. Hence it was inevitable that having copped a 128MByte Memory Stick for my Sony Clie, I'd want to stuff it with dictionaries.

 Oddly enough decent language dictionaries proved far easier to find than a good English one. First I checked out a couple of products from Collins and the Bulgarian/American company Beiks. Both have demo versions so you can see roughly what you're getting before parting with money, and both seemed pretty good. Then following a tip-off from my friend John Lea I arrived at the website of the German firm TrueTerm (www.trueterm.org) which specializes in language dictionaries for Palm, Pocket PC and Symbian handhelds. Their dictionary reader software is neat, has a small memory footprint, and you can plug in extra languages at will. Dictionary data can live on card, and it comes with a hack that lets you use it from within any Palm application that has an edit box - just select any word and a tap-and-hold on the Find button looks up the, say, Italian for that word. Having bought Italian/English for €9.95 I was impressed enough to go back and pick up the French/English and German/English too, just for kicks. This whole bundle occupies about 5Mbytes of card space, and is equivalent to three of those little green books.

 Now to find a good monolingual English dictionary. I'm a difficult customer as my own vocabulary's fairly broad and I read stuff by folk with broader still - so I only go to a dictionary for fairly obscure words. I recalled some I've looked up in recent years and chose the following five to act a test set: accidie, boustrophedon, prorogue, sumptuary and thaumaturgy. The dictionary I use most of the time is Collins English v1.5 from my laptop's hard drive. It has a rough user interface, stuck in the days of Windows 3.1, but I've found its content excellent: as a bonus it contains a reasonable biographical dictionary and gazeteer of towns, handy whenever you write about Ouagadougou (as I'm doing now) or want to know its population (375,000 since you asked). I have the Shorter Oxford on my laptop too but use it rarely. Both of course score 5/5 on my test words. The Collins occupies around 10Mbytes so it could fit easily on a Palm with a card, but I discovered that there's, as yet, no Palm version.

 I scoured the web for free or shareware English dictionaries and one that cropped up repeatedly was Noah Lite, a freeware product based on the Princeton University WordNet database, a sort of semantic net that joins words with related meanings. It had only one of my five test words, but the definitions it does have possess a surreal, tautological quality that leaves you wondering if you've learned anything ('slave (verb) slave, break one's back, knuckle down, buckle down, work very hard, like a slave'). A weird hybrid of thesaurus, plain and slang dictionaries - yechh.

 I downloaded a trial version of American Heritage PocketLingo which scored 1 out of 5. The demo version of Beiks English Pro only goes up to C, but still scored two which was promising. However it seemed to contain a lot of overly-specific botanical and zoological stuff, rather as if someone had tossed in a New Mexico flora just to boost its size. Then I really goofed: reasoning that any OUP product would be good, I paid for the Electronic Oxford Pocket English. There's no demo version and it needs the Mobipocket ebook reader, so I had to cough up $33 in all and it scored zero, nix, nil, zip. What's more Mobipocket looks every bit as horrid as people say, and crashes if it doesn't like your face.

 Finally, exhausted and sickened, I stumbled across MSDict from the US firm Mobile Systems Inc. (www.mobi-systems.com). This cost me a further $19 (Oxford written-off as dead loss), but it scores 4/5, looks good, runs fast from card and like TrueTerm works from inside Palm apps. Now I'm almost there, with highly useable English and Italian (plus bonus French and German) dictionaries all living in my inside pocket. The icing on the cake would be if they all ran under one reader instead of two, but that hardly matters since they coexist happily. I'll admit though I was shocked by how many products prefer gimmicks like 'add your own definitions' over providing a decent grown-up lexicon. Next business, how to port my computing dictionary into TrueTerm format.