'American Heritage Dictionary': When you're lost for words

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Winword 97, the latest version found in Office 97, has a lot of trendy little features, such as the coquettish Office Assistant. However, I don't really use it. I play around with it once in a while because my friends and colleagues are beginning to use it and they often come to me with questions which they expect me to be able to answer.

For heavy-duty document formatting, such as a 200-page book, I usually choose WordPerfect. The facility to add and delete formatting codes is the program's strong point. We are in control when we work with WordPerfect.

Believe it or not, my regular word processor is still the same one: a Ami Pro 3.1. Why am I such a fanatic of Ami Pro, which was not written for the 32-bit environment in the first place? I wrote about this before. One of the things that I like most about Ami Pro is its thesaurus.

Whenever we need a different word to convey our ideas, to add variety and richness to our writing or speech, we go to a thesaurus. Most word processors, including the big three, have an on-line thesaurus that will give us lists of words related in meanings to the one we use.

In Winword 97, use the keyboard rather than the mouse to call up the thesaurus. Just press Shift-F7. If you prefer to use the mouse, you'll have to dig twice to get to the thesaurus command, because it's buried in the Tool menu item. You'll find a list of related words but you don't get a description of the meaning, like in Ami Pro. You cannot go back to your document when the thesaurus is on the screen because you have to first click on the Cancel button. The good news is that Winword's thesaurus frequently offers a list of antonyms -- words that have opposite meanings to the one we use.

In WordPerfect, the thesaurus can be run as a stand-alone applet. I find this option the most preferable, since we can simply go back to the document and continue typing by clicking on it with the mouse. When we need the thesaurus again, we just press Alt-Tab once to bring it up. Unfortunately, the thesaurus doesn't contain antonyms.

In Ami Pro, the thesaurus interface is very straightforward. I like it because it has a box in which the general meaning of a word is displayed. Like in Winword, unfortunately, Ami Pro's thesaurus has to be closed before we can go back to our document. There are no lists of antonyms or related words, either. Still, I find the word choice more sensible than in the thesaurus of the other two word processors.

Dictionary

What if you want to know more detailed definitions, pronunciation, part of speech, proper usage, hyphenation and inflections of a particular word? And what if you want to know how it is spelled in British English, or even hear how it is pronounced by a native speaker? A complete dictionary on your computer screen is indeed no less as convenient as the MTR in Hong Kong. The American Heritage Dictionary, is one of a growing number of CD-ROM-based electronic dictionaries you can find in computer software stores today.

Written and marketed by Softkey International, this dictionary also has a very uncomplicated interface. Installation is very easy and if you choose to, you can install macros that can integrate it into Ami Pro, Winword or WordPerfect.

You can set it to display the meanings or the thesaurus, or you can split the screen into two to display both. In the accompanying picture, you can see the definition of the word element displayed in the upper part of the top box while all the words related to each of its meanings come out in the thesaurus box at the bottom. If you want to see more of the meanings, just click on the Dictionary button. Click on the Thesaurus button to display only the related words.

If you have a sound card and a pair of speakers, you can hear the pronunciation of each word. You can turn this feature off, or set it to pronounce the word once, twice or three times automatically as the program looks it up. To hear it again, you just click on the Pronounce button. The pronunciation is American, of course.

If you'd like to know the British spelling of a particular word, for example neighbor, you can press Ctrl-A and the dictionary will give you the words neighbor and nabbers. If you type in the word practice, the dictionary will explain to you that the word is the British variant of practice.

A portion of the entries have the history of the headwords. Neighbor is one of them. The dictionary has many lines of explanation, including that the word may have come from the West Germanic naehgebuer. It goes as far as citing Matthew 19:19 that urges one to love one's neighbor.

Some of the entries also have the synonym section under their definitions. For example element, which has the words component, constituent, factor, and ingredient as its synonyms. The central meaning shared by these nouns, according to the dictionary, is "one of the individual parts of which a composite entity is made up". In some other entries, the dictionary also explains the different nuances between synonyms. Examples are also provided to clarify usage notes further.

Canvas or canvass?

Artists paint on canvas. That much I known already. But when I tried out the dictionary's WordHunter utility, I came across the word canvass (with two 's's). WordHunter enables us to target specific words based on the words or qualities we already have in mind. For instance, I had the word opinion and public and I wanted to find out the words that had these two words in their definition. I typed in the words "opinion AND public" in WordHunter, and it gave me the list of words that included commissar, a person who tries to control public opinion, and canvass, to conduct a survey of public opinion.

I searched again with the words division and integer, and I got partition. The search can be refined by using the operators OR and NOT, as well as parentheses to narrow it down. You can even use labels, such as geography and British to further restrict the scope of your search. WordHunter gives you the list of labels that you can use.

Another tool that's available in the dictionary is the Anagram. Type in center, and you'll get words that have all of its letters, such as centre, tenrec and recent. To check their individual definitions, double-click on any one of them and it will appear in the Dictionary box.

During installation, the sound files are not copied into the hard disk because it would take up more than 300 megabytes. Therefore, you need to keep the CD-ROM in its drive if you want to be able to hear the pronunciation. If the CD-ROM is not in the drive, the dictionary can still run but there will be no sound.

The dictionary has abundant examples. It also contains biographical entries and various other types of information. With idiomatic expressions and phrasal verbs also included, the dictionary is quite a rich reference source. The thesaurus contains as many words as Roget's II: The New Thesaurus but, in my opinion, it's still very limited compared to the hardcover St. Martin's Roget's Thesaurus on my shelf. Unfortunately, too, the dictionary does not record our actions or provide a history of our previous searches. Although there are two buttons that we can press to browse through the list of words in the dictionary, there's no way for us to go back to the words we already looked up unless we enter it once again.

Again, the dictionary is not the only electronic dictionary on CD-ROM that you can buy today. Most electronic encyclopedias, such as Compton's Multimedia and Microsoft BookShelf, also include a dictionary. Do you want to know what has climbed to the top of my wish list? A CD-ROM changer. With a changer, I can have more than one reference sources on CD-ROMs handy without having to swap discs. Changers are becoming more widely available, but the prices of the good ones are still pretty high.