Opinion Goodbye to the language patrol

Not Wordnik,the vast online dictionary. No modern-day Samuel Johnson or Noah Webster ponders each prospective entry there. Instead,automatic programme search the Internet,combing the texts of news feeds,archived broadcasts,the blogosphere,Twitter posts and dozens of other sources for the raw material of Wordnik citations,says Erin McKean,a founder of the company. “We don’t pre-select and pre-prune,” she said. “We show you what’s out there now. Then we let people decide whether to use a word or not.”

At one time,she was the head of the pruners,as principal editor of the New Oxford American Dictionary. But McKean has chosen a different path at Wordnik. “Language changes every day,and the lexicographer should get out of the way,” she said. “You can type in anything,and we’ll show you what data we have.”

When readers ask about a word,Wordnik provides definitions on the left-hand side of the screen. But it is the example sentences,featured on the right-hand side,that are crucial to a reader’s understanding of a new term,she said. “Dictionary definitions tend to be out of date or incomplete,” she said. “Our goal is to find examples on the Web that use the word so clearly that you can understand its meaning from reading the sentence.”

To do this,the site processes a vast reservoir of language,keeping tabs on more than six million words automatically,said Tony Tam,Wordnik’s vice president for engineering.

Wordnik does indeed fill a gap in the world of dictionaries,said William Kretzschmar,a professor at the University of Georgia. “It takes time for words to get into the more formal,published dictionaries,” he said. “Wordnik is sensitive to what people are interested in now.”

Geoffrey Nunberg,a linguist at the School of Information at the University of California,Berkeley,who talks about language on Fresh Air,the NPR programme,appreciates Wordnik’s breadth. “There’s a lot of useful information here,” he said. But he thinks that hands-on lexicographers could fine-tune the entries. “The idea that you can pull lexicographers out of the loop and have an algorithm to mediate between me and the English language is goofy,” he said. “Without hand citations done by trained people,you get a mess.” To illustrate his point,he noted flaws in a number of Wordnik’s definitions. The first definition of “davenport,” for instance,in three of the five sources used by Wordnik is a kind of small writing desk. “It hasn’t meant that since Grandma was a girl,” he said.

People use a dictionary to find out what is correct,and what is incorrect,he said. “If I were a journalist looking to see if a word was being used correctly,” he said,“I wouldn’t put my eggs in the Wordnik basket.”

Wordnik and other new linguistic databases have come about largely because of the vast body of text on the Internet and improved algorithms for searching it,said Mark Liberman,a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. “What Wordnik is giving you is not as raw as a Google search of examples,” he said,“because Wordnik sorts and clusters the examples into different senses of the word.”

Dictionary builders have come a long way since the days of Johnson and Webster,said Kretzschmar. “But we have computers,” he said. “We can manage this vast network of words online and appreciate it in ways that Johnson and Webster never could.”