Merriam Webster 2008 Word of the Year: “Bailout”

 

Merriam-Webster’s Word Of The Year, It’s Right On The Tip Of Every American’s Tongue, But What Does It Mean? – CBS News via kwout

Merriam Webster has revealed the 2008 Word of the Year:  bailout!  Other top words, indicators of the mood of our nation, included trepidation,” “precipice” and “turmoil.”

“There’s something about the national psyche right now that is looking up words that seem to suggest fear and anxiety,” said John Morse, Merriam-Webster’s president and publisher.

According to this CNN article, “Several well-worn terms from the presidential campaign also made the cut: “maverick,” “bipartisan” and, coming in at No. 2, “vet” – to appraise and evaluate, as in vetting a vice presidential pick.

How does Merriam Webster define “bailout”?  Check it out below:

bailout – Definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary via kwout

 What do you think?  Do you agree that bailout should be the 2008 Word of the Year?  Vote in our poll!

Wordia: Redefine the Dictionary!

Redefine the dictionary – wordia via kwout

Many thanks to cherished UGA friend and fellow media specialist (Collins Hill High School in Gwinnett County, Georgia) Holly Frilot for sharing this cool Web 2.0 tool with me:  http://wordia.com/ .  Wordia encourages users to think of a meaningful word, to record a video defining the word, and then to upload the video.  I can see this is a fabulous way to make vocabulary study much more meaningful and collaborative!   Students…try out this tool and impress your teacher for your next vocabulary assignment!

Cool Online Dictionary: Visuwords Online Graphical Dictionary

Are you a visual learner?  Here is an awesome dictionary tool for you:  http://www.visuwords.com/! 

Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections.

• It’s a dictionary! It’s a thesaurus!
• Great for writers, journalists, students, teachers, and artists.
• The online dictionary is available wherever there’s an internet connection.
• No membership required.

Visuwords™ uses Princeton University’s WordNet, an opensource database built by University students and language researchers. Combined with a visualization tool and user interface built from a combination of modern web technologies, Visuwords™ is available as a free resource to all patrons of the web.

Cool Dictionary Tools

Sandi Adams, Web 2.0 maven for the CCSD, has turned us on to two cool new dictionary tools this week! 

The first cool tool is Definr, or “The Incredibly Fast Dictionary.”  What is Definr?   The official answer:

Definr.com is a fast, free dictionary based on Princeton’s open WordNet 2.0. The website framework is Ruby on Rails. Looking up words in a dictionary is easy, so we do that with MySQL and cache the top 10,000 definitions in memory.  Doing word completion (a.k.a. auto-complete, auto-suggest, globbing) is not easy, at least not when you have to search through 200,000 words for every keystroke. So our word completion is done in a C module for Ruby, and the word completion server is separate from the rest of the site.

With the DefinrBot algorithm, we can do 190,000 word completions per second without caching, and that translates to about 10,000 completions per second once the Ruby layer is factored in.

Regular person answer:  you get definitions super fast!  The part of speech and synonyms are also included with the definition.  If you are browsing the web with Firefox, you can also add a Definr extension tool to your toolbar.

Cool Tool 2:  Merriam Webster has now added the Visual Dictionary Online.  MW says:

The Visual Dictionary is designed to help you find the right word at a glance. Filled with stunning illustrations labeled with accurate terminology in up to six languages, it is the ideal language-learning and vocabulary dictionary for use at school, at home or at work.

 

When you know what something looks like but not what it’s called, or when you know the word but can’t picture the object, The Visual Dictionary has the answer. In a quick look, you can match the word to the image.  The Visual Dictionary is more than a reliable resource of meticulously labeled images—it innovates by combining dictionary-scale definitions with exceptional illustrations, making it the most complete dictionary.

This new visual dictionary can help you better conceptualize unfamiliar terms and improve your retention of the word. 

Use these tools to help you with those weekly vocabulary and writing assignments!  Definr and MW Visual Dictionary:  not your grandma’s dictionaries!