Dictionary

I wrote the other day, about switching to Noah Webster’s dictionary everywhere, I possibly could. Now I did that after reading this lovely James Somers post. And that post seems to be resounding through the web, with folks integrating it into their workflows in different ways. So I was really happy when I read Jon Snader’s post telling me I could have my beloved Webster’s dictionary in Emacs! This sounded too good to be true! I didn’t believe it! Because why would I believe some old, wise wizard who’s only been writing about Emacs on a near daily basis for close to fourteen years?! I had to try this out myself! So I whip out ye, old, trusty scratch buffer, type crap into it and select it.1 And then I fire up M-x dictionary-search, like Snader tells me to This is the moment of poop … err truth! I hit return and … How now brown cow?! It actually works! ...

This James Somers post, made me realise why my dictionary word lookups were so much less engaging than when I was a kid. From the post … […] go look up “flash” in Webster’s (the edition I’m using is the 1913). 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”) ...