Democtionary
Demos ,"the think tank for everyday democracy" (at least, that's what they call themselves on their website) has "called for the Oxford English Dictionary to be replaced as the leading authority on English by a website listing new words suggested by the public in the UK and overseas." (according to a story in The Independent)
They want this site to be called democtionary.org and have put up a call for help at that URL.
I'm absolutely, positively, 100% FOR the idea of having web-based, user-generated new word collecting, but the idea that one-dictionary-fits-all gives me a headache. The OED is not a list of the birth announcements of shiny new words, it's more like a genealogical document that traces the family tree of each word included. How that would be replaced efficiently by a new-words-only website I leave as an exercise for the reader.
They want this site to be called democtionary.org and have put up a call for help at that URL.
I'm absolutely, positively, 100% FOR the idea of having web-based, user-generated new word collecting, but the idea that one-dictionary-fits-all gives me a headache. The OED is not a list of the birth announcements of shiny new words, it's more like a genealogical document that traces the family tree of each word included. How that would be replaced efficiently by a new-words-only website I leave as an exercise for the reader.
Labels: historical_dictionaries, wikis
This entry was posted by Erin, on
Friday, March 23, 2007.
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1:34 PM
This is unrelated to your post, but I couldn't find an e-mail address for you so I thought I'd leave a note.
I loved your talk at the UofC Library Society meeting yesterday. You did an awesome job conveying the greatness of the wiki and community involvement (especially the definition of wwhhrrrr-BOOM-crash), given the non-tech-savvy audience. The nod to Creative Commons was great too.
I had one question though: what's your take on the results of productive morphology? I figure including all the products of inflectional morphology is out, but if you have the word "dictionaried", do you really need "undictionaried"?
Thanks again for such a wonderful talk!
9:07 AM
Hey Quinn! Thank you so much for your kind words ...
I do like the idea of including the obvious outputs of productive morphology, just because I think that it helps give people "permission" (which of course they don't really need) to use those kinds of words.
Lots of dictionaries now have long lists of "un" words where the meaning is pretty much "not" + the base word.
Of course, the first hurdle is getting folks other than me to use 'dictionary' as a verb ...