Bringing Serendipity Back
If Timberlake can bring sexy back, then I guess dictionaries can bring serendipity back too. I’m a regular user of online dictionaries and they all seem about the same to me (which is to say, somewhere between pretty bad and awful) so I use them through Google rather than having a go to favorite. I search for the word and then pick one or more of the top 10 hits to look at.
Today a search on the word “monotonist” (I know what it should mean, but I said it the other day, and then wondered if it was actually a word or if I just made it up) brought me to this fairly gross site - http://www.websters-dictionary-online.com/definition/monotonist (linked with nofollow to avoid giving them any link juice). I’m certain, due to the suspicious lack of branding, the poor performance of the page loads, and the dubiousness and quantity of its ad content, that it’s not actually associated with Webster’s (which is here - http://www.merriam-webster.com/).
What caught my eye was this part of the page:
How cool! I can’t begin to count how many hours I spent unintentionally reading the dictionary as a kid. I’d ask my parents how to spell a word, or what a word meant, and they’ d inevitably answer “d-i-c-t-i-o-n-a-r-y” or “it means you should look it up”. I’d traipse over to the family set of the Funk & Wagnall’s encyclopedia (bought from the grocery store on subscription, those were the days!) and its accompanying dictionary (in 2 volumes) and look up the word. Once I found my word, I could never resist the siren call of the other words on the page. Mixed among the handful of words I knew were amazingly short words, gigantic polysyllabic monstrosities, foreign words without enough vowels or with too many vowels, and words with accompanying black and white pictures, line drawings or maps. Each trip to the dictionary was a multi-paged odyssey through the English language.
Sadly, I doubt my kids, lifelong online dictionary users, have ever experienced this. The Web was invented to provide better context; the raison d’etre of the hyperlink and the subsequent Web server and Web page was to provide context to referenced concepts with just one simple click. But what these online Web dictionaries don’t have is page context. What else is on this dictionary “page”? What is on the “opposite page”? The “next page”? The “previous page”? And why are these words near one another? Is there a shared prefix or root? A shared word of compound words?
Links and the power of the Web to provide context are used in every online dictionary page and it would be hard to argue that the Web doesn’t provide a much better experience for exploring a specific word. You have links to antonyms and synonyms and etymology and stems and related words, and, and, and… But what about the words that are “physically” near this one? I haven’t seen an online dictionary attempt to provide this until stumbling on this shady site.
The “nearness” of words is an important concept in my brain’s structure and in my understanding of English. I don’t think I’m alone in this, but I do think that in the span of just one generation we’ve probably lost that part of the organizational structure of our language in our brains. It’s a shame. We shouldn’t go back to paper dictionaries of course, but there is something for the other dictionary sites to learn from and improve on in this site’s listing of adjacent words.
