NOPE NOPE NOOOOOPE fuck that man.

    • manxu@piefed.socialEnglish
      18·
      4 days ago

      It’s always surprised me that search engines don’t point to Wiktionary by default, and in fact usually don’t show it in search results on the first page.

      Over the years, it has gotten better and better and now is an almost universal resource on all word forms. You see a word and don’t know what it means? You put it in the search bar at Wiktionary and the site will figure out it is the second person aorist of the passive voice of the Ancient Greek verb kataminomai, used only between the second and third centuries in the Hellenistic colonies of Mars. Made up example, of course, but the quality of the information is insane.

      • Carighan Maconar@piefed.worldEnglish
        1·
        4 days ago

        For the Kindle versions (yeah I still got one, I know, but not tossing a functional device!) that’s the .mobi I presume? And how do I install that as a proper new dictionary? Does it auto-recognize that if I just copy it in the main folder?

        • SmokeyDope@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          2·
          4 days ago

          I don’t own/use a kindle but did a 2 minute search and found this promising fourm post comment from user Enterio https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=360684

          "On my Kindle (Paperwhite, 11th gen), the dictionaries are held in the “\documents\dictionaries” subfolder (I kept my firmware to an older version to keep my USB connection). When I bought them online (on Amazon, see Kindle Default Dictionaries category), I received pre-made MOBI files that I only had to place in the aforementioned subfolder, without converting them to other file formats. Afterwards, I set up my default dictionaries for every language on my Kindle in Settings → Language & Dictionaries → Dictionaries. Hope that helped. "

    • SlurpingPus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      Also Wiktionary imported the whole Webster dictionary from early 20th century sometime in the beginning of their operation, and apparently Webster was a fan of thoroughly describing each of the twenty meanings of a word. Which tradition continues in Wiktionary to this day — instead of giving three-word descriptions for two or three meanings tops, as other online dictionaries do.

      My one complaint is that the thesaurus at Wiktionary is so-so, being exhaustive only for things like euphemisms, which naturally have many synonyms. In most cases, Thesaurus.com is a better resource.

  • Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    30·
    4 days ago

    The most offensive part is the monthly price point. What goo between the ears business idiot convinced these people they could charge more than a Netflix (+ ads) subscription for the dictionary? You could literally buy a brand new one and set it on fire every month for that cost. Fucking leeches.

  • Stefen Auris@pawb.socialEnglish
    15·
    4 days ago

    I will buy a fucking printed edition and flip through pages before I pay a subscription for the fucking dictionary

  • smh@slrpnk.netEnglish
    11·
    4 days ago

    You can probably get access through your local public library, if you’re on their Wi-Fi. OED has been like this for as long as I’ve been paying attention. Source: librarian and before that was annoyed at OED, but now I’m almost always on work Wi-Fi if I’m looking something up, so it’s invisible to me.

    • MurrayL@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      Yep, exactly this.

      I use OED as my standard reference when writing - I can log in from anywhere with my library card number and get full access without paying a penny.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      41·
      4 days ago

      Welcome to the modern day. Everything is stupid, and intentionally designed for you to have a bad time. Then you can pay money to have a better time.

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        6·
        4 days ago

        Welcome to the modern day. Everything is stupid, and intentionally designed for you to have a bad time.

        To be fair, if you go back to the pre-Internet era, the OED was pretty expensive in print. Your library might have had a copy, but most people wouldn’t.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary

        In 1933, the title The Oxford English Dictionary fully replaced the former name in all occurrences in its reprinting as 12 volumes with a one-volume supplement. More supplements came over the years until 1989, when the second edition was published, comprising 21,728 pages in 20 volumes.[1] Since 2000, compilation of a third edition of the dictionary has been underway, approximately half of which was complete by 2018.[1]

        Most people don’t have a 20 volume dictionary floating around the house.

        When I was growing up, our house used the Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.

        Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary is a large American dictionary, first published in 1966 as The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: The Unabridged Edition. Edited by Editor-in-chief Jess Stein, it contained 315,000 entries in 2256 pages, as well as 2400 illustrations.

        That’s pretty beefy for a single book, but it’s a far smaller and less-costly dictionary than the OED.

        Various libraries near me might have had an OED, but I don’t think I ever used it there, either.

        My guess is that if you were gonna have a big set of reference books, you’d probably be more likely to have an encyclopedia set, maybe get Encyclopedia Britannica, not the Oxford English Dictionary.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopædia_Britannica

        The Encyclopædia Britannica (Latin for ‘British Encyclopaedia’) is a general-knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It has been published since 1768, and after several ownership changes is currently owned by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. The 2010 version of the 15th edition, which spans 32 volumes and 32,640 pages, was the last printed edition.[1] Since 2016, it has been published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia at the website Britannica.com.

        We used the somewhat-smaller World Book Encyclopedia:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Book_Encyclopedia

        The World Book Encyclopedia is an American encyclopedia.[1] World Book was first published in 1917. Since 1925, a new edition of the encyclopedia has been published annually.[1] Although published online in digital form for a number of years, World Book is currently the only American encyclopedia which also still provides a print edition.[2] The encyclopedia is designed to cover major areas of knowledge uniformly, but it shows particular strength in scientific, technical, historical and medical subjects.[3]

        World Book, Inc. is based in Chicago, Illinois.[1] According to the company, the latest edition, World Book Encyclopedia 2024, contains more than 14,000 pages distributed along 22 volumes and also contains over 25,000 photographs.[4]

        As of 2022, the only official sales outlet for the World Book Encyclopedia is the company’s website; the official list price is $1,199.

        I think that the idea of a large, expensive, many-volume print home reference work is probably fading into the past with the Internet, but it used to really be something of a norm.

        The OED in print today costs $1,215, and you can still get the thing. So that’s pretty comparable to the pre-Internet past.

        They also sell online subscriptions for $100/year. I think that most people with a home set likely didn’t bother to replace their encyclopedia or dictionary and just let it get out of date, so they probably didn’t get an OED set and replace it every 12 years (well, discount the cost of financing there) so online access would cost more…but it’s probably not wildly worse.

        $100/year is definitely not worth it for me for OED access, but, then, neither is the print edition, and that’s been the long-run norm for what someone would get if they wanted the OED.

        Honestly…considers I don’t think that I actually even have a print dictionary. I used to have a little vest-pocket dictionary that was floating around somewhere, but not a standard bookshelf reference. Just too many freely-available online ones. If I bought one, I probably would not buy the OED.

        I do think that the paywall will make the OED less-relevant relative to other dictionaries.

        But I don’t think that the world is worse off now than it was when one had to go buy a large print book (or a 20-volume set of books, if that’s how you swung) and then go haul it off the bookshelf when you wanted to reference it.

  • s@piefed.worldEnglish
    8·
    4 days ago

    That is the definition of enshittification… right? I don’t know, I can’t check

  • SmokeyDope@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    8·
    4 days ago

    In case anyone is wondering you can download a stardict of the shorter oxford english dictionary (and most of the other dictionaries mentioned in this thread!) and have a local copy then use software like stardict or svdc to look up. I actually put up a copy on the internet archive earlier this year. Good timing huh? https://archive.org/details/soedrich-star-dict-2022-11-11

    • village604@adultswim.fanEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      It’s been like that for a long time. The OED is mostly used by academics and it’s not the dictionary that most people are familiar with. It’s basically a historical reference of the English language.

  • WhatsHerBucket@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    4 days ago

    Just one more example of how the internet will continue to create a big divide of people that can afford it, and those that can’t.