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Jedi, Klingons invade new dictionary
(Definitions)
Science fiction's "Jedi" warriors and "Klingon" bad guys have entered the newest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, along with "asylum seekers," "asymmetrical warfare" and "spin control."
The first new edition in nearly a decade of the short version of the classic word bible will appear on Thursday, with 3,500 new entries, from "ass-backwards" to "warp drive."
Britain's prime minister Tony Blair is immortalised with "Blairism," "Blairite," "New Labour," "Old Labour" and the ill-fated construction project, the "Millennium Dome."
New slang terms include "get real" and "badass."
There are also 500 new quotations. Among the writers whose literary citations appear for the first time are best sellers Tom Clancy and Nick Hornby, "Bridget Jones" author Helen Fielding and, inevitably, "Harry Potter" creator J.K. Rowling.
But although new words from science fiction favorites like "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" have made it, words coined for the "Harry Potter" books are still too new to appear.
"Generally, a word has to be used five times in five different places over five years, although something like 'text messaging' got in quicker because it became so widely used so quickly," said spokeswoman Claire Turner
(extract from the CNN site)
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/UK/09/25/offbeat.dictionary.adds.reut/index.html
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WordWeb: the free thesaurus and dictionary for Windows
(Other)
WordWeb Pro is a quick and powerful English thesaurus and dictionary for Windows. It can be used to lookup words from almost any Windows program, showing definitions, synonyms and related words. You can search for words matching a pattern, find and solve anagrams, and optionally search a large number of extra word lists.
Unlike any paper dictionary or thesaurus WordWeb is truly a Word Web - each set of synonyms is linked to other related sets. Lookup "tree", click on the "Types" tab and you'll have a list of different types of tree. Click on "Part of" and WordWeb will tell you that a tree can be part of a "forest" or "wood".
http://www.wordweb.co.uk/free
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Swedish-English Dictionary
(Current usage/news)
Here you'll find some good examples of "the virtual dictionary" on Internet. The dictionaries have been issued by the Swedish National Agency for Education. They are included in the Lexin series. Lexin is primarily produced to meet the need of immigrant education. Lexin currently consists of about 30000 words.
(extract from the "Swedish Schoolnet" site)
http://www-lexikon.nada.kth.se/skolverket/lexin-en.shtml
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Search for the Perfect Baby Name
(Other)
Find that perfect name, learn meanings and origins and see how your choice will look with your last name. Just select your choices from the drop down boxes and click "suggest some names". You'll find the meanings and origins of the name. Be sure to check out these the most popular names and use the form below to let us know what name you choose.
http://www.uhs.net/whatscool/babynames/index.asp
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The Cook's Thesaurus
(Definitions)
The Cook's Thesaurus is a cooking encyclopedia that covers thousands of ingredients and kitchen tools. Entries include pictures, descriptions, synonyms, pronunciations, and suggested substitutions.
chinois Notes: This fits on top of a deep container and mashes food that pressed through it.
sudare = sushi sudare = sushi roller Notes: These are made of bamboo. Substitutes: flexible plastic place mat.
Rhizomes are knobby underground stems that have pungent and flavorful flesh. Ginger is the most familiar example, other rhizomes include turmeric, galangal, lesser galangal, and fingerroot.
http://www.foodsubs.com/
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Elecronics Music Dictionary
(Jargon and Slang)
Representative entries: Flange, Fletcher-Munson Curves, floating point, floating, unbalanced line, HDCD (high definition compatible digital), HDTV (high definition television), headroom, Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von,Hertz (Hz), Hertz, Heinrich Rudolf
http://musicnet.chandra.ac.th/eng/elec-dic.htm
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U.S. firm to test China's English skills on the Net
(Education/learning English)
Students of English in China will soon be able to have their writing skills tested over the Internet by a U.S. company.
The U.S.-based Educational Testing Service, which created the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), said on Thursday students in China with access to Internet could use new technology to test their preparedness for TOEFL.
"The whole process, between the time it is submitted and the student receives the score onscreen, is about 10 seconds," ETS Technologies' Chief Executive Richard Swartz told reporters in Beijing.
ETS is the world's biggest private exams firm.
Learning English has taken on a new urgency in Communist-run China, which has braced for a renewed wave of foreign visitors since joining the World Trade Organisation and winning the bid to host the 2008 Olympics last year.
One in eight of the 800,000 students who sit the TOEFL every year are Chinese, said Kirson Herbert, executive director at ETS for international development.
The commercial online unit of ETS will use computers at its Princeton, N.J., headquarters to grade practice essays submitted via the Web site www.englishtide.com, run by Hong Kong-registered online learning firm Tide English Publishing Ltd, officials said.
Under the deal, ETS Technologies would earn a percentage of the fees collected by Tide English from students submitting practice essays, Swartz said.
But Tide is yet to decide what it would charge for the practice essay, a Tide executive said.
(article by Jonah Greenberg, Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com
Cambridge Dictionaries Online. Searches five Cambridge Dictionaries for a single word.
(Dictionaries)
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/
Microsoft Encarta World English Dictionary (North American Edition)
(Dictionaries)
http://dictionary.msn.com/
The Lycos Research Center
(Dictionaries)
http://reference.lycos.com/
Online Dictionaries, Glossaries and Encyclopedias
(Dictionaries)
http://stommel.tamu.edu/~baum/hyperref.html
MacquarieNet delivers a vast range of quality Australian and international reference information to school students, families and professionals. MacquarieNet is easy and fun to use. MacquarieNet is brought to you by the publishers of the authoritative Ma
(Dictionaries)
http://www.dict.mq.edu.au/
Dictionary.com - Search for one word across multiple dictionaries.
(Dictionaries)
http://www.dictionary.com/
On-line dictionaries
(Dictionaries)
http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/rbeard/diction.html
Thesaurus, Phrases and Quotations
(Dictionaries)
http://www.freeality.com/phrasest.htm
Longman is the foremost supplier of electronic dictionaries and thesauruses for language research. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) in particular has been used by many researchers involved in many linguistic disciplines, including n
(Dictionaries)
http://www.longman-elt.com/dictionaries/research/dictres.html
Merriam Webster's Site Map
(Dictionaries)
http://www.m-w.com/map.htm
Onelook provides a very special "Internet search engine" that finds on-line dictionaries that contain the word you look for. The actual dictionaries are provided by other web sites.
(Dictionaries)
http://www.onelook.com/
The American-British / British-American Dictionary (for English Speaking People) The definitive American<-->British translation guide, includes links to all other sources.
(Dictionaries)
http://www.peak.org/~jeremy/dictionary/
The Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus is an exploration of sense relationships within the English language. By clicking on words, you follow a thread of meaning, creating a spatial map of linguistic associations.
(Dictionaries)
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/
xrefer is the web's reference engine, a unique service providing free access to the largest collection of encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri and quotations
(Dictionaries)
http://www.xrefer.com/entry/149738
Yourdictionary.com has a quick lookup, word of the day (English and Spanish), articles, and essays on English topics. It's great!
(Dictionaries)
http://www.yourdictionary.com/