Wordnik’s Online Dictionary - No Arbiters, Please - NYTimes.com
►http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/business/wordniks-online-dictionary-no-arbiters-please.html
“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.”
“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. “ But the numbers change every second,” he said. “It’s not a static list.”
“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,” [...] “Without hand citations done by trained people, you get a mess.”
Another innovative database is at Brigham Young University, where Mark Davies, a professor of linguistics, has amassed a collection, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, 1990-2011 , containing millions of words of running text from articles, transcripts of conversations, and other sources. The collection, which indexes 425 million words of text — 1,000 may be from a newspaper article, for example — has been built over the last three years. It shows how often a word is used, and the types of discourse in which it is found, be it conversational speech or academic prose.
The collection also lets users see words found near a new word . [...] the words are called collocates .