The saga of Apple's inexplicable App Store approval policies just got even weirder. This time, a dictionary iPhone app was rejected for containing profanity, and only accepted once a 17+ rating was attached, and the allegedly obscene words were removed from the app. Even more frustrating is that Ninjawords, the censored dictionary, distinguishes itself by using different sources for its definitions than any other app on the store right now. It could have been a great app.

It's true that it's Apple's store, and Apple is allowed to make the rules, but it's hard to see how such a crucial part of the iPhone business can continue to expand with rules so sporadically applied. Developers won't want to develop, for fear of having their apps rejected, or being asked to remove content or functionality before they're allowed into the store. These same arguments come up every time a legitimate-seeming app gets rejected, but Apple really doesn't seem to have learned its lesson: rejecting legitimate apps is bad for everyone involved. Censoring a dictionary to protect readers certainly isn't going to sell any phones.

[via Daring Fireball]

Wordnik is a bit like a dictionary, in the sense that it collects words and their definitions, but it aspires to be more than that. Users contribute example sentences, audio pronunciations, images from Flickr and more, so you can really get a good idea of how and when a word is used. There's also a thesaurus-plus "related words" feature, which shows not only synonyms and antonyms, but other words that are used in a similar context.

Wordnik isn't exactly Wiktionary, but it does accept user contributions of just about anything you can think of about a word. The combination of images, audio and contextual clues would also seem to make it a better dictionary than most for non-english speakers, and its library contains a weighty 1.7 million words. Since it's laid out better than most dictionary sites, and also incorporates definitions from some of the better ones, it wouldn't be a bad move to replace your current favorite online dictionary with Wordnik.

Lower your geek radar detector. You got me. I am a tech blogger. I also have a degree in library science. Guilty as charged, just put me on a cell block with wireless and a supply of graphic novels.

I am a librarian who is really okay with wikis. Would I accept every entry in one as gospel? No, but questioning is good in print, too. I believe wikis are, by and large, a decent starting point for further research, like any encyclopedia. If you're writing your doctoral thesis using only wikis, we seriously need to talk. Now.

Wikis, online open encyclopedias, I can deal with. The Kids Open Dictionary Builder makes me fear the future, and not because of all the talking monkeys and flying robots, either. Yes, I said The Kids Open Dictionary Builder, and I typed it just as the name appears on the Creative Commons blog. The blogger there typed it as it appears on the project's home page. Grammatical structure is not the writing skill that comes to me most naturally, but, guys, when you're educators pushing an open dictionary, it is comforting to see the name punctuated correctly.

Ever find yourself puzzling over an unfamiliar word on a web page? Sure, you could open a new browser tab and look it up at Dictionary.com. Or you could just drag a Lingro bookmarklet to your browser toolbar and hit it to make every word on a web page clickable. When you select a word a definition will pop up, assuming you've set the tool to translate from English to English. You can also click on the flag iconts to translate words into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Polish, or Swedish.

The definitions are culled from publicly available dictionaries and user contributions filed under a Creative Commons license. So if you find a word without a definition, a message will pop up asking if you'd like to contribute one. Of course, the odds of your clicking the word if you already knew the meaning are pretty slim (unless you're say, writing a review of Lingro).

You can also use Lingro the old fashioned way, by visiting the service's home page and typing in a word or entering a web address to translate. There's even a service that lets you upload a file from your desktop for translation into another language.

Honestly, we didn't have much luck translating entire web sites. But Lingro's dictionary definitions and single word translations seem pretty good.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

There must be something in the water this week. While the biggest new media acquisition story of the day has to be CBS buying CNET for $1.8 billion, big companies are swallowing up smaller ones left and right. Media company Comcast is buying social networking site Plaxo for something like $150 million, while Ask.com is shelling out an undisclosed sum for Lexico, the company that runs Dictionary.com.

While there's been a lot of speculation recently that someone was going to buy Plaxo, Comcast wasn't the first company that sprung to mind. We figured a company that already has ties to the social networking space like Google or Facebook would have made more sense. In a blog post on the subject, Plaxo CEO Ben Golub says Comcast has plans to "bring the social media experience to mainstream consumers." That means using Plaxo's technology to connect with your contacts across multiple devices. And since Comcast is already in the TV, phone, and ISP business, it should be interesting to see how this plays out. Perhaps your TV viewing habits will automatically be added to your social networking profile? Yeah, we hope not.

The Ask.com/Lexico deal seems like a more natural fit. We doubt Lexico's popular web sites like Dictionary.com will disappear. Rather, Ask will be able to increase its overall web traffic by bringing the new sites into the fold.

How often have you started arguing with a friend over the correct pronunciation of a word? You know, the kind of word that you read all the time, but suddenly realize you've never heard spoken out loud. Well, before you beat your friend to a bloody pulp, you might want to check out howjsay, an online pronunciation dictionary.

All you do is type in a word, and howjsay will speak that word back to you in a rather dignified sounding voice. You'll also get a list of similarly spelled words in case you typed your entry wrong.

One of the most impressive things is that you get multiple pronunciations for words that can correctly be said more than one way.

[via makeuseof]

Thanks to Dictionary.com and a thousand other websites, it's probably been years since you've cracked open that unabridged dictionary you keep around the house just to look even geekier than you really are. But when you want more than a quick definition, VisuWords can give you a whole new way to look at the English language.

Type a word into VisuWords search bar and the word pops up, along with a bunch of related words and concepts. Hover your mouse over any word for a definition and take in the whole screen to get a sense of how the words are related to one another. Or you can double-click on a node to bring up even more related words.

VisuWords is based on Princeton University's open source WordNet database, and works as a kind of dictionary/thesaurus/great way to kill some time.

[via MakeUseOf]

Getting around Wikipedia could take shorter than you have been previously use to. For instance, do you know about the keyboard shortcuts?

Keyboard shortcuts aren't a well known feature for users of the popular online encyclopedia, but they do exist. I recently came across a post by Steve Rubel reminding me of this fact.

These keyboard shortcuts work with any browser, and on both PC and Mac platforms, and don't need to install any special Greasemonkey script, and will surely speed up your time when searching for useful content.

Depending on which browser you are in you will have to use hold down this combination of keys, then hit your access key:

• Mozilla Firefox 1.5: hold Alt, press access key
• Mozilla Firefox 2: hold Alt-Shift, press access key
• Internet Explorer: hold Alt, press access key, and then press Enter
• Opera: press Shift-Esc, then press access key
• Mac OS: Control and a key

Check out a cheat sheet for the key shortcuts after the jump:

Google has a little problem in China lately. It seems as though some software developed by a rival company ended up in a recently released Chinese software tool that Google 'developed'.

Google apologized once they were called out for after they found out about Sohu's software being inside of their Pinyin Input Method Editor. For their part, Google said that Sohu's software it was used during development of the application and that they utilized non-Google database resources to build the tool, but didn't say how they obtained the database used.

Since Google uncovered the issue, they have released a new version on Sunday that uses a new dictionary. Google Pinyin is a piece of free Google software that allows users to input Chinese characters using the alphabet keyboard without using the operating systems built in inputting system.

[via InfoWorld]

I like ninjas. That being said, I don't really associate ninjas with dictionaries. However, Ninjawords aims to change that. Or something. Ninjawords is a simple Ajax dictionary that aspires to be like a ninja: smart, accurate, and really fast. Type in your word, smack the enter key, and you definition pops up. That's it! Yes, a very simple tool, and a pretty obvious use of Ajax at that, but I enjoy Ninjawords' clean, uncluttered interface. It also has a couple extra features, like the ability to look up multiple words at once (just separate them with commas) and easy URL-based lookup (just type ninjawords.com/yourwordhere). It will also make spelling suggestions. While I still love the venerable Dictionary.com, Ninjawords is a great alternative, though I wouldn't want to meet it in a dark alley.

One of my favorite new features in Firefox 2.0 is the inline, as-you-type spell-check. I'm a pretty good speller, but everyone makes mistakes, and as a blogger it's great to have a spell-check feature that has my back but stays out of my way. Still, I've been occasionally surprised by the words Firefox doesn't have in its dictionary. Firefox of course allows you to add words to its dictionary by right-clicking on the word and choosing "Add to dictionary," and the words you add are stored in your "personal dictionary" file PERSDICT.DAT, which lives in your profile folder. After using Firefox 2 Beta 1 for a few weeks, I decided to poke around in it and see what words I had collected, and below you can find my 43 favorite words Firefox doesn't know.

aggregator ahold API app blog blogger dialogue Digg DIY DNS doppelganger filmmaking Firefox Google IM

inline iPod JavaScript malware megapixel Moleskine Mozilla multitasker nerdcore offline okay onboard online Photoshop podcast

PVR screencast screenshot spamming tarnation taskbar timeline toon USB VoIP webcomic weblog wiki

You'll observe that many of them are technical terms, trade names, and neologisms, and I certainly don't fault Firefox for omitting them from its dictionary. I'm most amused, though, that "Mozilla" and "Firefox" aren't part of its vocabulary, though. Have you been using Firefox 2? Do you have any interesting entries in your PERSDICT.DAT? Post them in the comments below!

In my opinion, selling software on a USB drive is a fantastic idea, and Merriam-Webster has taken it and run with it with their USB Dictionary & Thesaurus. It's a 256MB flash drive that includes MW's dictionary and thesaurus software, plus phonetic spelling correction, a grammar guide, and a "Confusables" function for correcting mistakes like their vs. there vs. they're. It also includes something described as an "eBooks and eNews Manager." The rest of the space on the USB drive (the amount of which is unspecified) can be used to store whatever you want. Unfortunately few details on the software itself are available, so I'm not sure if the dictionary and thesaurus software are the same as the ones MW sells on CD-ROM, or whether it works on a Mac. The Merriam-Webster USB Dictionary & Thesaurus costs $49.95. Now, when can I get the OED in my pocket?

[Via Engadget]

Take a dictionary, add AJAX-y goodness, season to taste and you've got ObjectGraph, a dictionary that displays results automagically with each keystroke. The interface works like Google Suggest, where a dropdown DIV element displays results as you type. You have your choice of four different word sets: Classical is the websters 1913 dictionary (which is rather amusingly out of date), the freely available FOLDOC online dictionary (which should probably really be the default selection), the periodic elements, and a Thesaurus mode.

[Via Digg]

Please don't call it a dictionary. It's "an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory." Actually it's pretty flippin' cool, that's what it is. WordNet goes beyond simple definitions and finds synonyms, hyponyms, hypernyms, and puts a word in context. It's based on synonym sets, or synsets, which map lexical concepts, and provide a more powerful way of exploring the relationship between words... In other words, it might help your writing instead of hurting it (like a thesaurus tends to do). Available in Win and Unix flavors, plus a Mac version here.