j’s scratchpad

This April 2004 Sky magazine article about the online Merriam-Webster dictionary discusses how the executives use the data gathered from online searches to revise the dictionary and its Web site. The Springfield, Massachusetts, company scrolls the search terms across a screen like an Internet search company does and compiles rankings and stats from a day’s searches.

At the recommendation of a science writer, I read Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman, about the Oxford English Dictionary, a few years ago. How dictionaries are created and revised fascinates me. Imagine using the power of wikis to create and revise dictionaries, like Wikipedia does.

Addendum 5/12: Merriam-Webster now has a live lookup feature on their Web site highlighting recent searches. (Doh! I just looked something up and didn’t think to watch it to see if I could see the word.)

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 2nd, 2004 at 11:02 pm and is filed under Librarianship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.