'WordWeb', another dictionary worth looking at

'WordWeb', another dictionary worth looking at

Zatni Arbi, Columnist, Jakarta, zatni@cbn.net.id

As the bulk of my work requires a lot of writing in English,
while my native tongue is not English, I naturally have to rely
on a lot of dictionaries and thesauruses. That is why I have
always been very keen on trying out any dictionary and thesaurus
that I can lay my hands on.

The computer is really a boon to those who need to look up
words because it makes flipping through pages and squinting over
small print things of the past. With electronic computers, all we
have to do is type in the word that we have in mind, and the
program will give us one or more definitions in return.

A couple of things can be said about today's computer
dictionaries. First, more and more of them have a built-in
thesaurus as well. Second, they are also increasingly packed with
convenient features. To top it all, many good dictionaries are
also free, including WordWeb.

And, talking about the Web, it is a truly humongous dictionary
with a huge collection of definitions. If you have access to the
Internet, you hardly have any excuse to say you do not know what
a particular English word means.

As one of the readers of this column e-mailed me some time
ago, an excellent Web dictionary is Atomica
(www.gurunet.com/us/products/). It is a great tool that will give
us the various medical, technology-related or general meanings of
a word, in addition to its translation in several languages
including Dutch, Arabic, Japanese as well as both simplified and
traditional Chinese. However, it requires that you have an
always-on connection to the Internet.
* Freeware download

WordWeb is a freeware, which means that you can use it and
share it with others without having to pay for it. However, as in
the case of many free software programs, it is a stripped-down
version of a much better version that you have to buy should you
be interested in using it. In this case, if you like WordWeb,
which I believe you will, you may also become interested in
buying the commercial version, WordWeb Pro.

Despite the name, WordWeb is an offline piece of software. It
means that you can use it on a PC or notebook without a
connection to the Web. WordWeb can be downloaded from
wordweb.info/free/.

In my test, it worked well with Microsoft Office XP, WordPad,
Notepad and Lotus WordPro. I no longer had WordPerfect installed
on my work computer, so unfortunately I was unable to test how it
would work on this former king of word processors.

The default hotkey is Ctrl-Alt-W, and we can change it. In
Word XP, WordWeb will detect the word we want it to define by
finding where the I-beam is -- the vertical line that tells you
where the next character that you type will appear. So, for
example, if I want to find words with meanings related to the
word "example" as I am typing this sentence, all I will have to
do is place the I-beam inside the word and then press the hotkey.
WordWeb will then give me alternatives such as "model, exemplar,
illustration, instance and representative.

In the other word processing programs, however, placing the I-
beam inside the word is not enough. We have to highlight the
entire word before WordWeb will pick it up and find its meanings
for us.
* Good, but not perfect

WordWeb, which is now in Version 2.0, has definitions and
synonyms for 135,000 words. It handles both the American and
British spelling conventions. It recognizes, for example,
"flavour" and "flavor", "licence" and "license". If you type in
"colour", one of the synonyms it will give you will be "color".

The dictionary also offers list of words that are remotely
related to the keyword at various levels, although the labels for
the individual lists are not really informative. Its database
also contains proper names, such as Marx, Tocqueville and Newton.
When I entered "Bush", however, it gave me the two Bush
presidents as well as the definitions of "bush". It always
changes "Putin" into "put in".

I should say that the definitions are useful only to a certain
extent, though. No usage illustration is available. The great
thing is that, when we installed WordWeb, it also detected other
dictionaries that had already been installed and placed them on
the list of its cross-reference materials. So, if I clicked on
the X-Ref button in WordWeb, for example, it would give me the
list of my other dictionaries -- Random House Webster's
Unabridged Dictionary and iFinger. This button would also lead me
to Web dictionaries, which would include Encarta.

In addition to a lot of illustrations, there are a couple of
things I would like to see in a computer dictionary but do not
find in WordWeb. First, as I am still learning the language, I
appreciate the multimedia capability of a dictionary that will
pronounce the words for me with a click on a button. Second,
WordWeb does not give me the other parts of speech of a given
word. So, for example, if I enter "innovation", I will not get
"innovational", "innovative", "innovator" or "innovativeness".
Third, I would like to have a dictionary that allows us to add
our own entries. This would give me a one-stop reference source
so I would not have to end up using multiple dictionaries when I
work.

The commercial version of WordWeb is WordWeb Pro. It offers
the facility for wildcard searches so that we can enter ???gance,
for example. It also includes straight as well as multiple-word
anagrams. The best part is perhaps that we can edit and add its
database, which is the capability that I am actually looking for.
However, I still have not decided whether I will spend US$18 for
this version.

A word of caution, though. A CNET reader commented in his
review that this freeware might be a spyware, i.e., a piece of
software that has been written to steal information from your
computer -- mostly for advertising purposes. I have not been able
to confirm this. However, at least this dictionary is not on the
list of SpyChecker (www.spychecker.com).