Words of the day, 1755

Here's a challenge – see how many of these word's from Dr Johnson's dictionary you can work into conversation this weekend...

bedpresser a heavy, lazy fellow
fopdoodle a fool
kicksy-wicksy a word in disdain or ridicule of a wife (but not Mrs Apus, obviously)
fleshquake a tremor of the body
dandiprat an urchin
jobbernowl a blockhead
giglet a wanton

Come to think of it, when was the last time you heard anyone say "fellow" (in the sense of chap), "urchin" (in the sense of scamp), "blockhead" (in the sense of dunderhead) or, more's the pity, "wanton"?

OED: Chinky

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary entry for 'Chinky' is a little odd. It reads:

Chinky n. (pl. -ies) informal 1 offensive, a Chinese person. 2 a Chinese restaurant.

So usage 2 isn't offensive then? I'm fairly confident that anyone who was offended at being called a Chinky would be similarly offended if their restaurant was described in the same way.

Visuwords vs Erin McKean

A while back I wrote about a speech by Erin McKean, editor-in-chief of the Oxford American Dictionary, in which she talked about the future of the dictionary. One of the things McKean said was that the current crop of online dictionaries did not live up to their potential; apart from being searchable and having a few links, they were just the same as their print equivalents.

Evidently McKean hadn't come across Visuwords, which is the fantastic 'online graphical dictionary' pictured here (although in practice I've found it works better as a thesaurus). Type in a word and Visuwords graphically shows any related words in an expanding spidergram. Parts of speech (noun, verb etc) are indicated through different colours, and hovering over a word brings up a definition.

If nothing else, it's incredibly pretty (it even impressed one of our designers), although words with many associations tend to bring the web browser on my Mac grinding to a near halt.

I'm adding Visuwords to our list of production desk tools, which you can find on the panel to the bottom right of the blog. Alternatively follow the link in this post.

Erin McKean: redefining the dictionary

Today I'd like to plug this video presentation by Erin McKean, editor-in-chief of the Oxford American Dictionary. It's about the future of the dictionary and takes about 15 minutes to watch.

McKean make the interesting point that one advantage of a print dictionary over current online dictionaries is 'serendipity': "When you find things you weren't looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult."

Apus and I have discovered many of our favourite words through serendipity - from absquatulate (chiefly North American; 'leave abruptly') to covin (archaic; 'fraud, deception').

Incidentally, the TED website has a number of other talks that might be of interest; speakers include Al Gore, Bono and Richard Dawkins among many others. Makes a change from watching YouTube videos of people being stupid.