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New Electronic Database: the Oxford English Dictionary

by Van

The Oxford English Dictionary is now available online at all library locations and to Ann Arbor District Library cardholders from home or office. The Oxford English Dictionary is a historical dictionary providing the meaning, etymology, pronunciation, and usage for over half a million words from across the English-speaking world.

The advanced search offers some useful features. You can use wildcards in your search. The question mark, “?”, can be used to replace any one single character. The asterisk, “*”, can be used to represent any number of characters (or no character at all). In the advanced search you can combine two or more words in your search. You can use “and”, “or”, “and not”, and “near” to combine words. With “near” you can choose whether your search words need to appear within 1, 2, 5, or 10 words of each other.

If you want to find a word for a lover of words, then you can enter “love*”, select “near” and enter “words”, then choose within 2 words from the pull-down menu on the right.

The eight search results include logophile, defined as a lover of words.

Comments

Outstanding. With all the activity on new buildings, etc., it's good to see the library investing in fundamental additions to its collections. How about adding LexisNexis?

I'm glad this is here, but it seems like it's not entirely working properly in my browser (Firefox 2.0.0.13). In particular, if I click the "Etymology" button then the frame which contains the main word definition just ceases to exist.

Anyway, I this is an excellent service for the AADL and I thank those who helped to obtain it.

Well, I don't know if they fixed anything but now I'm not seeing this problem. I did switch to Flock which is 2.0.0.14 based, so maybe that fixed it or maybe I did something else. (Would have sworn I was also having this problem with this version of Flock earlier....)

Splendid! This is going on my toolbar...

"She actually seemed happy to be there."
Miss Tarango from <i>Don't Call me Ishmael</i>

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