I have talked about dictionaries in the past, so you might know that I have a certain fascination with them. One of the best things about the interwebs is the ability to access information about just practically anything in a very short time. If someone mentions some sort of literary reference in a chat, one quick jump to Wikipedia and I can instantly be up to speed. Or if someone uses a word I can’t remember or don’t know the definition of, I can pop over to dictionary.com and quickly discover the missing piece of information.
But just how quickly? I timed the following process for five different words:
- open a new tab in firefox
- enter dictionary.reference.com in the address bar (the address autocompletes, so I’m only type di, down arrow, enter).
- enter the word and wait for the definition
This takes about 7 seconds per word. Part of the slowness is the fact that there are about a bazillion ads on dictionary.com. Sometimes I start typing but not all of the ads have finished loading so the javascript hasn’t put the focus in the word box. The result is that half the word is missing when the focus finally goes in there and I have to start over. In those cases, I expect the average time jumps up to more like 10-12 seconds. This is also annoying.
Enter ninjawords.com. Average time per lookup using the above method is 3 seconds. There are no ads. The instant step 2 is done and I start typing, the text box has focus and in under a second after hitting enter the definition is displayed. Beautiful. Plus, I can separate multiple words by commas and get more than one definition at a time, saving me from repeating steps 1 and 2.
Unlike dictionary.com, ninjawords uses Wiktionary. So no longer do I have the research potential of seeing the Indo-European roots of words and there is always the potential for vandalism to seep in and corrupt a particular definition, though that has a low probability. If I need definitions with authority, I can always resort to dictionary.com. If I need them with speed for use in fast-paced settings (like in the middle of an IM session), I can use ninjawords.
Posted by jhumphries on 19 December 2007 at 23:37:23
Using Google Toolbar in Firefox I can do this in about 3 seconds per word:
Click in the Google Toolbar search textbox
Type “define:” and then type the word
Google Toolbar provides generally good suggestions so you typically don’t have to type the whole word
This provides multiple definitions from multiple sources when available (sometimes lots). And, each definition has a link to the source, so if Dictionary.com is a source, you could click the link to get root words or etymology. Its search includes Wikipedia, too, so you can even do something like “define:masters of the universe” and get meaningful results.
Posted by Jason Adams on 19 December 2007 at 23:45:34
Yeah good point. I keep my google toolbar hidden since i’m on a widescreen laptop with 1280×800. The hope is to maximize the vertical real estate given to web pages (which feels woefully lacking on occasion).