YourDictionary

On the following lines, it is going to be described one free on-line english dictionary called Yourdictionary. This dictionary can be visited on the website http://www.yourdictionary.com/. As it has already been said, it is an english dictionary that translate the words from english to english, in other words, monolingual. That is why this book is particularly useful for those persons who are english native speakers or that have already a high level of English. However, many people do not only need only english dictionaries and thanks to this web they can find dictionaries for a lot of different languages, Yourdictionary is also a language portal with more than 2,500 different dictionaries. Moreover, Users can also find grammars in over 300 languages. It has to be said that this incredible site is owned by LoveToKnow Corporation which is a company that also includes sites such as PublicBookshelf.com, Adviceopedia.org and FlexJobs.com.

But why is YourDictionary different from others dictionaries like Wordreference? There are several reasons. For instance, one aspect that makes it special is that it has many resources such as the Webster’s New World Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary or the Computer Desktop Encyclopedia. Furthermore, some of its resources are taken from wordbooks which are specialized in a certain domain or field. For example, there are some words from the field of law that do not appear in a regular lexicon, but with Yourdictionary the user can find these words thanks to the Webster’s New World Law Dictionary.

Another advantage is the possibility to use  Thesaurus which consists on a reference work that groups together different types of words that have similarity in meaning or that are connected. For example, imagine that you are looking for the word ball, you will find (apart from the definition) words like globe, balloon, baseball… This wordbook has more options than Thesaurus like sentence examples, acronyms, images, idioms, quote examples…You can see in the next image how Thesaurus works.

Moreover, the fact of being able to look up words that we do not know how they are spelled also makes a distinction between the other dictionaries.  Take as an example the word receive. Imagine that you do not know how it is spelled between the letter c to the letter v. The only thing you have to do is to write two question marks where you do not know how it is spelled. E.g : re c??ve( or an asterisk if yo do not really know the number of unknown letters)Finally, the dictionary also includes games for improving our language skills (crosswords, word definition games, anagram puzzles…) and forums to speak about languages or words.

In conclusion, it could be said that the dictionaries of this century are changing the concept of what we understand by dictionary.  We can look up words free, faster, have in the same portal grammars and dictionaries, games for improving our knowledge of the language,forums… Nowadays, there are not excuses for learning new languages. There are magnificent tools available for those ones willing to increase their knowledge of the world!

Yourdictionary http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/8071714

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References

• About YourDictionary. In YourDictionary. Retrieved 17:21, March 23, 2011 from http://www.yourdictionary.com/about.html
• LoveToKnow Company Background. In LoveToKnow. Retrieved 18:00, March 23, 2011 from http://www.lovetoknow.com/Company_Background/information.html
• Thesaurus ( 2011,March, 13) In Wikipedia. Retrieved 19:45, March 23,2011 from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thesaurus&oldid=418606628