by Niel de la Rouviere

Created on: January 17, 2009

With the accelerating Internet culture quickly taking over many aspects of our lives, and change is not merely a buzz word, many things are becoming outdated and old-fashioned: the English dictionary is one of them.

The last time I used a dictionary was three years ago when I was playing a game of Boggle while on vacation. This vacation spot was 50 miles away from the highway on a gravel road with no shops and its population is about a meagre 300. When I looked up the word in an old torn and tattered family dictionary, it was missing. At first I doubted the spelling, but when I searched on

Dictionary.com the mysterious word revealed itself.

The dictionary in paper form is therefore not representative of the language itself. It merely is a repository for words at the moment that the dictionary was printed. In our fast paced culture this is not acceptable anymore. Lexicographer, Erin Mckean, outlined this very notion in a brilliant TED speech.

She arrives at the conclusion that when we can do away with the pruning of words, because of the limit of the paper dictionary, we can start to create a much more rich language experience where the dictionary is the language. This poses a problem of made up ridiculous words, but isn't that what language really is? The conveying of your experience to another at the best of your possibilities and if both of you understand the intended meaning of a new word, it enriches your perception of the thoughts that you are trying to convey.

Two projects have been started online to try and change this: Urban Dictionary, which is a more gritty Internet speak social dictionary and there this new start-up Leximo. It aims to be the Wikipedia of words and to create a world dictionary. If they can somehow integrate this into a spell checker, which is a also a main reason for not using the dictionary anymore, and create a backbone for written articles all over the web that tracks new words and let's users define them, then it could be a gold mine for words.

The status of the dictionary has become associated with the nerdy, because no-one uses them anymore. It is not used to check spelling, but only to learn new words and to be precise on definitions, and how can today's dictionary cope if you rely on it to be up-to-date on definitions? No-one wants to spend money on new editions every year, just so they can read through it and check if their definitions are up-to-date and learn some new words. The model is inherently inefficient.

Thus, relying on a dictionary is like trying to still ride a horse carriage to work in today's modern times. It's archaic and outdated and with the ease of the Internet and spell checkers, there is no need to dig up the dictionary every time a word momentarily eludes you.

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