Re: dictionary desk space

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

M.W. Poirier wrote:
 1. Tinyspell and/or Tinyspell+.  they can be made to beep whenever one
   hits a wrong set of keys.
Well. Xy's native speller USED to do that. Unfortunately, however
Windows and modern hardware manage sound, it no longer does. Or at
least not at a decibel level to be heard.
 2. The next programme is not so much a distionary as it is a
   corrector of standard typos, i.e., "amd" for "and", "teh" for
   "the", plus many other typos. Here again you can teach it
   to correct your own typos, and/or to expand your shorthand
   expressions.
And Xy's native speller does that too. I greatly rely on the
autoexpansion feature when writing, having several spellers, each with
a different set of words to autoexpand (e.g., when writing up the town
council meetings, I just type borough officials' initials and get
their full name and title).
But if we're talking about dictionaries as sources of lexical
information, I have to agree with Robert. The OED is sui generis, the
last word. Any copy editor who doesn't have access to it, and consult
it frequently, is, IMHO, a rank amateur. Desk dictionaries are fine
when spell check is rejecting every possible spelling you can think
of, or when you come across some new technical or trendy term (I
should have looked there for 'peloton', but it looked so Greek I
assumed someone was trying to catch me out with some ancient term).
But for the REAL information on the etymology and history and meanings
of an English word, there's no place better than--no place remotely
approaching--the OED. Well, Skeat's Etymological Dictionary to
supplement it.
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx