Merriam Webster Visual Dictionary Online

ESO Students,

We would like to recommend a very useful resource, the online visual dictionary by Merriam Webster. It is structured in 15 major themes to access over 6,000 images. In our opinion it is one of the few linguistic online tools which rivals Google Images.

The Visual Dictionary is designed to help you find the right word at a glance. Filled with stunning illustrations labelled with accurate terminology in up to six languages, it is the ideal language-learning and vocabulary dictionary for use at school, at home or at work.

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When you know what something looks like but not what it’s called, or when you know the word but can’t picture the object, The Visual Dictionary has the answer. In a quick look, you can match the word to the image.

The Visual Dictionary is more than a reliable resource of meticulously labelled images—it innovates by combining dictionary-scale definitions with exceptional illustrations, making it the most complete dictionary.

 
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The Visual Dictionary is an indispensable visual reference that goes beyond object identification to answer questions about function, significance and purpose. Ideal for teachers, parents, writers, translators and students of all skill levels, it helps the user understand a phenomenon and quickly grasp the meaning of a term, the characteristics of an object or simply learn something new.

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only

Vocabulary.com: The World's Fastest Dictionary

We offer you again a new resource, another online dictionary. At vocabulary.com they brag theirs is 'The World's Fastest, Smartest Dictionary'.

They say that unlike most online dictionaries, we want you to find your word’s meaning quickly. We don’t care how many ads you see or how many pages you view. In fact, most of the time you’ll find the word you are looking for after typing only one or two letters.

They also hold that whenever you look up a word, you can add it to your learning queue. We'll prioritize that word, so you can start learning it right away. That way the next time you see it, you won't have to look it up.

And they add that each vocabulary word includes a short blurb that is easy to understand and fun to read. We provide usage examples from real life, so you can see how words are used in context.

Finally, if you find a word you're interested in just click to add it to your list of favorite words, or any other vocabulary list. Vocabulary lists are a powerful way to keep track of words you’d like to learn or to share your favorite words with others. This is one feature we definitely encourage you to use: their vocabulary lists are really useful when learning vocabulary, writing compositions, drawing mind maps, etc.

If you're interested in learning more about it, visit how it works.

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only.

Memidex: Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and More

As of today, among the online dictionaries Labor English Zone offers you will find Memidex, one of the quickest and easiest ways to get and compare online definitions, synonyms, etymology, and audio pronunciation.

Memidex is a free online dictionary and thesaurus with a simple interface, complete inflections, auto-suggest, adult-filtering, frequent updates, a browsable index, support for mobile devices, and millions of external reference links for definitions, audio, and etymology. It's fast too. Use the Find box for exact matching or browse using the complete index.

The Memidex online dictionary and thesaurus has been redesigned to better support web browsers on handheld and mobile devices while being just as usable (or more) as with regular desktop browsers.

Memidex external references currently include over 5.4 million definition references, 5.3 million audio references, and 1.8 million etymology references. Each reference has a title, a list of any other associated terms, an excerpt or description of the resource, a link to the actual web page, and a link to cite that specific resource in various established bibliographic styles. The references are from over a dozen leading online reference sources.

Each audio reference has a button to play the audio directly from the Memidex web page. You have unlimited playback for audio from open-license sources such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary, and one playback per session for copyright-protected sources. Most of the audio is for pronunciation while other audio demonstrates or describes the associated term. 

We hope you will find it as useful as we do.

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only.

Top 10 Rare & Amusing Insults

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary has published their Top 10 List of Rare and Amusing Insults in English. Here they are:

1. Cockalorum: a boastful and self-important person; a strutting little fellow (If cockalorum suggests a crowing cock, that's because cockalorum probably comes from kockeloeren – an obsolete Dutch dialect verb meaning "to crow.")

2. Lickspittle: a fawning subordinate; a suck-up (Lick plus spittle says it all: someone who licks another person's spit is pretty low indeed. Incidentally, lickspittle keeps company with bootlicker ("someone who acts obsequiously").)

3. Smellfungus: an excessively faultfinding person (The original Smelfungus was a character in an 18th century novel. Smelfungus, a traveler, satirized the author of Travels through France and Italy, a hypercritical guidebook of that time.)

4. Snollygoster: an unprincipled but shrewd person (The story of its origin remains unknown, but snollygoster was first used in the nasty politics of 19th century America. One definition of the word dates to 1895, when a newspaper editor explained "a snollygoster is a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles....")

5. Ninnyhammer: ninny; simpleton, fool (The word ninny is probably a shortening and alteration of "an innocent" (with the "n" from "an" getting transferred to the noun) and "hammer" adds punch. Writers who have used the word include J.R.R. Tolkien in the Lord of the Rings trilogy: "You're nowt but a ninnyhammer, Sam Gamgee.")

6. Mumpsimus: a stubborn person who insists on making an error in spite of being shown that it is wrong (Supposedly, this insult originated with an illiterate priest who said mumpsimus rather than sumpsimus ("we have taken" in Latin) during mass. When he was corrected, the priest replied that he would not change his old mumpsimus for his critic's new sumpsimus.)

7. Milksop: an unmanly man; a mollycoddle (a pampered or effeminate boy or man) (Milksop literally means "bread soaked in milk." Chaucer was among the earliest to use milksop to describe an unmanly man (presumably one whose fiber had softened). By the way, the modern cousin of milksop, milquetoast, comes from Caspar Milquetoast, a timid cartoon character from the 1920s.)

8. Hobbledehoy: an awkward, gawky young man (Hobbledehoy rhymes with boy: that's an easy way to remember whom this 16th century term insults. Its origin is unknown, although theories about its ancestry include hobble and hob (a term for "a clownish lout").)

9. Pettifogger: shyster; a lawyer whose methods are underhanded or disreputable (The petti part of this word comes from petty, meaning "insignificant" (from the French petit, "small"). As for fogger, it once meant "lawyer" in English. According to one theory, it may come from "Fugger," the name of a successful family of 15th and 16th century German merchants and financiers. Germanic variations of "fugger" were used for the wealthy and avaricious, as well as for hucksters.)

10. Mooncalf: a foolish or absentminded person (The original mooncalf was a false pregnancy, a growth in the womb supposedly influenced by a bad moon. Mooncalf then grew a sense outside the womb: simpleton. It also morphed into a literary word for a deformed monster. For instance, in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Stephano entreats Caliban, "Mooncalf, speak once in your life, if thou beest a good mooncalf.")

Now, Labor students, do you happen to know anybody who matches one (or more) of the definitions above?

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only

Linguee.com - Online Translator Showing the Context of Sentences

What is Linguee?

With Linguee, you can search many millions of bilingual texts for words and expressions. Every expression is accompanied by useful additional information and suitable example sentences.

What is the benefit?

When you translate texts to a foreign language, you usually look for common phrases rather than translations of single words. With its intelligent search and the significantly larger amount of stored text content, Linguee is the right tool for this task. You find In which context a translation is used, how frequent a particular translation is, example sentences: How other people translated an expression

By searching not only for a single word, but for a respective word in its context, you can easily find a translation that fits optimal in the respective context. With its large number of entries, Linguee often retrieves translations of rare terms that you don't find anywhere else.:

How do I use Linguee?

Linguee is used like a search engine. You search for a word or a phrase, and you find pairs of sentences that contain the word or the phrase as an exact or similar match. If the search is not successful, it usually pays off to simplify the search phrase and search again. The search result is clearly arranged in groups of expressions and ordered by frequency. By clicking on the "More examples" button you are presented with more example sentences. 

What Linguee is not

Linguee does not offer an automatic translation of arbitrary texts. Such services may help to get the gist of foreign language texts. However, they are not useful for looking up vocabulary, and you cannot rely on the quality of the generated translations, as a machine cannot understand the subtleties or contexts of language. Linguee takes a different approach: Every entry in the Linguee database has been translated by humans. Currently, there is no viable technical alternative to a human translator, and if you don't have one at hand, there is Linguee.

Where does the text content come from?

The most important source is the bilingual web. Other valuable sources include EU documents and patent specifications.

How exactly do you gather the translations?

A specialised computer program, a web crawler, automatically searches the internet for webpages which are available in multiple language versions. These pages are detected automatically, and the translated sentences and words are extracted. The texts are then evaluated by a machine-learning algorithm which filters out the high quality translations for display. This system is capable of autonomously learning new quality criteria from user feedback to tell the good translations from the bad ones. It has found out, for instance, that a page is usually machine translated if it contains the word "Wordpress" while many words are literally translated. Through this training process, our algorithm is learning to find thousands of such correlations to reliably extract the best translations autonomously. As of now, Linguee software has compared more than a trillion sentences. At the end of the day, only the top 0.01 per cent, i.e. 100 million translated sentences, are retained. Therefore, this automation is the basic reason why Linguee actually works.

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only.

Forvo: Pronunciation Guide

What is Forvo?

Forvo is the largest pronunciation guide in the world. Ever wondered how a word is pronounced? Ask for that word or name, and another user will pronounce it for you. You can also help others by recording your pronunciations in your own language.

Join us for free whatever your language is and help the world to communicate better. Enjoy listening and collaborating.

Try it here (or the Spanish version here).

No copyright infringement intended. For educational, non-commercial purposes only.

Visuwords, online graphical dictionary

Cristina Ponce, from 4th B, suggests Visuwords™, an online graphical dictionary. It works as a normal dictionary, although Visuwords does not only give meanings of words, but associations with other words and concepts, producing diagrams similar to a mind map or conceptual map.

It is very easy to use. You only have to enter words into the search box at the top of the page to look them up. A network of nodes or 'synsets' will spring out from the word that you entered using a colour code and different graphic connnections explained on left-hand column.
A 'synset' is essentially a single concept that is represented by a number of terms or synonyms. For example when you lookup "seem", you see that the word is connected to four synsets each represented by a green circle. Green denotes verbs so all of these synsets represent verbs. Two of these synsets have the lone word "seem"; one has two terms: "appear" and "seem"; and the third has three terms: "look", "appear" and "seem". Each of the four synsets has its own definition.
Hovering over a node with the mouse will reveal all of the synonyms for a given synset as well as its definition. Some synsets will also show a few examples of usage. These synsets link to each other and to other synsets according to entries in the  database. 

You can also double-click a node to expand the tree. You can zoom the model in and out by rolling the wheel on your mouse. You can click the grey background within the applet and drag the mouse in order to shift the whole model around so you can explore. You can grab any node and pull it away from the others to clarify connections.

Thanks a lot for your great contribution, Cristina!