Easily search definitions and synonyms offline. The app is designed and optimized for your device. Dictionary.com is the leading free English dictionary app for iPad with over 2,000,000 trusted definitions and synonyms.
Google Dictionary Free Language DictionariesIt has a number of customizable features so you can create your ideal viewing situation or set up your music listening experience the way you want.ImTranslator provides a convenient access to Google Translate, Microsoft Bing Translator and other translation providers. With it, you can play nearly any media file, including MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MKV, WebM, WMV, and much more. VLC is the best free, open-source media player for the Mac. Go to the Google Translate website, and then click on. You would never look up an ordinary word — like example, or sport, or magic — because all you’ll learn is what it means, and that you already know.Free language dictionaries to download or look up online: Freelang offers free bilingual dictionaries.Total 8K Win 5K Mac 2K Linux 2K.Example /igˈzampəl/, n. Labels dictionary, google, translator. Sublime google dictionary plugin. Access dictionaries other languages and translate words into more than 40. The entries are pedestrian:Dictionary - FREE Search multiple English dictionaries, including an offline dictionary, all from the most trusted sources, plus specialty dictionaries, including Medical, Legal, Financial, Acronyms, and Idioms, as well as multiple encyclopedias and even Wikipedia.A delightful word like “fustian” — delightful because of what it means, because of the way it looks and sounds, because it is unusual in regular speech but not so effete as to be unusable, is described, efficiently, as “pompous or pretentious speech or writing.” Not only is this definition (as we’ll see in a minute) simplistic and basically wrong, it’s just not in the same class, English-wise, as “fustian.” The language is tin-eared and uninspired. Which trains you to think of the dictionary as a utility, not a quarry of good things, not a place you’d go to explore and savor.Worse, the words themselves take on the character of their definitions: they are likewise reduced. But that essence is dry, functional, almost bureaucratically sapped of color or pop, like high modernist architecture. The power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.Here, words are boiled to their essence. An activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.Magic /ˈmajik/, n. Audio driver for mac yosemiteIt goes on to tell you the differences all the way down the line — how each listed word differs from all the others. John McPhee’s secret weaponJohn McPhee — one the great American writers of nonfiction, almost peerless as a prose stylist — once wrote an essay for the New Yorker about his process called “ Draft #4.” He explains that for him, draft #4 is the draft after the painstaking labor of creation is done, when all that’s left is to punch up the language, to replace shopworn words and phrases with stuff that sings.The way you do it, he says, is “you draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity.” You go looking for le mot juste.“Your destination is the dictionary,” he writes:Suppose you sense an opportunity beyond the word “intention.” You read the dictionary’s thesaurian list of synonyms: “intention, intent, purpose, design, aim, end, object, objective, goal.” But the dictionary doesn’t let it go at that. The definitions are these desiccated little husks of technocratic meaningese, as if a word were no more than its coordinates in semantic space. There’s no play, no delight in the language. They’re all a chore to read. Google’s dictionary, the modern Merriam-Webster, the dictionary at dictionary.com: they’re all like this. If you were to look up the word “intention” in my dictionary here’s all you would see: “a thing intended an aim or plan.” No, I don’t think I’ll be punching up my prose with that.But somehow for McPhee, the dictionary — the dictionary! — was the fount of fine prose, the first place he’d go to filch a phrase, to steal fire from the gods. In fact I would have never thought to use a dictionary the way McPhee uses his, and the simple reason is that I’ve never had a dictionary worth using that way. You want the first kind, in which you are not just getting a list of words you are being told the differences in their hues, as if you were looking at the stripes in an awning, each of a subtly different green.I do not have this first kind of dictionary. ![]() It wasn’t so hard with the examples McPhee gives, and Google. What was this secret book, this dictionary so rich and alive that one of my favorite writers was using it to make heroic improvements to his writing?I did a little sleuthing. But I was desperate to find it. No wonder he looked up words he knew, versus words he didn’t, in a ratio of “at least ninety-nine to one.”Unfortunately, he never comes out and says exactly which dictionary he’s getting all this juice out of. It was actually the most popular book of its time by 1890 it had sold 60 million copies.But that wasn’t even Webster’s most ambitious project. The invention of American EnglishNoah Webster is not the best-known of the Founding Fathers but he has been called “the father of American scholarship and education.” There’s actually this great history of how he almost singlehandedly invented the very idea of American English, defining the native tongue of the new republic, “rescuing” it from “the clamour of pedantry” imposed by the Brits.He developed a book, the Blue Backed Speller, which was meant to be something of a complete linguistic education for young American kids, teaching them in easy increments how to read, spell, and pronounce words, and bringing them up on a balanced diet of great writing. He said that his dictionary gave him this: “Pertaining to, or situated under, the northern constellation called the Bear.”And that turned out to be enough to find it. El capitan mac os downloadThink of that: a man sits down, aiming to capture his language whole.Dictionaries today are not written this way. He wanted it to be comprehensive, authoritative. In 1807, he started writing a dictionary, which he called, boldly, An American Dictionary of the English Language. That is, you don’t get a sense, the way you do from a good novel, that there was another mind as alive as yours on the other side of the page.Webster’s dictionary took him 26 years to finish. When you read an entry you don’t get the sense that a person labored at his desk, alone, trying to put the essence of that word into words. They are built by a large team, less a work of art than of engineering. It makes sense: there was, and is, something remarkable about his 1828 dictionary, and the editions that followed in its line (the New and Revised 1847, the Unabridged 1864, the International 18, the New International 1909, the 1913, etc.). Today, of course, his name is so synonymous with even the idea of a dictionary that Webster is actually a genericized trademark in the U.S., so that other dictionaries whose contents bear no relation to Webster’s original can use the name just to have the “Webster” brand rub off on them. He was plagued by debt to fund the project he had to mortgage his home.In his own lifetime the dictionary sold poorly and got little recognition. He wrote it all himself, including the etymologies, which required that he learn 28 languages, including Old English, Gothic, German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Welsh, Russian, Aramaic, Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit. To convey as by a flash… as, to flash a message along the wires to flash conviction on the mind. The first thing you’ll notice is that the example sentences don’t sound like they came out of a DMV training manual (“the lights started flashing”) — they come from Milton and Shakespeare and Tennyson (“A thought flashed through me, which I clothed in act”).You’ll find a sense of the word that is somehow more evocative than any you’ve seen. But go look up “flash” in Webster’s (the edition I’m using is the 1913). I’d’ve had no reason to — I already knew what it meant.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorKatie ArchivesCategories |