Dictionary.com To use or Not Use

 Who is Dictionary.com?

When searching for the keyword dictionary on Google.com, Bing.com, or Duckduckgo.com the first, and sometimes, sponsored link for an online dictionary is www.dictionary.com. I personally found this interesting because when I think of a dictionary, the two major names that come to mind are Merriam-Webster, or Oxford English Dictionary, or at least a dictionary published by a pristine college, like Stanford, but instead we are welcomed, to what seems to me, a nameless, no prestige, website claiming to be a dictionary, but this is one of the most used online dictionaries available. 

So before we can even dig deeper into this resource to perform our critical analysis, let us figure out who this dictionary.com truly is and where they’re getting their resources and information. Because if you’re just going to call your resource dictionary then you better be willing to back that information up!

So, Who Even is Dictionary.com?

Dictionary.com was published and launched on May 14th 1995 by two gentlemen. Brian Kariger, who is currently a multi-billion dollar investor currently heading CEO of a company named Nothing Limited Ventures and Daniel Fierro, whose current knowabouts are unkno

wn. The only information I can find on Fierro is that he was a co-founder of Dictionary.com, according to both Wikipedia and Crunchbase.com. Both of these men in 1995 were part of a company named Lexicio Publishing, who incidentally, created and started Thesauars.com and Reference.com. At the time of writing, in 2018, AIC Company (Creator of Ask.com) is the current holder of all of the rights of Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com 
 

Who was or is Lexico Publishing? Why did they start Dictionary.com? 

Now this is where we start to get into some detail about who the big name of Dictionary.com was and whose name actually backs all of the definitions and other resources on this website. Lexico Publishing was founded in 1995, and was fully dissolved on August 26th 2022. Lexico was founded and created by Oxford University Press, who created this website to host the first online Dictionary publicly available for everyone to use. Oxford has had their dictionaries on computers, but it was used mostly in an intranet (private network in-which only people with physical permission can access), and nobody except Oxford students and staff could access this dictionary digitally. This website was also created to avoid paying publisher fees to Random House who, up until 2022, published Oxford’s physical dictionary. 

So who is actually running the show over at Dictionary.com?

Answer… Still very convoluted. When scrolling to the bottom of the website we are greeted by a company named Dictionary Media Group, which is a division of IXL Learning. As we can see, this new company owns and manages a multitude of other websites, including, but not limited to, Spanish Dictionary, French Dictionary, and math.

  

It appears that Dictionary Media Group’s targeted audience may be young learners still working though primary school. Digging deeper into Dictionarymedia.com, we find another name. Curiosity Media, who is also a division of IXL learning.  

 

And when searching for both IXL learning and Curiosity Media, I am still unable to find any other information on any of these entities. Right now, it appears that whoever owns the full rights to Dictionray.com is lost to the online ether of business. 

 

Homepage
The most important part of any website is the homepage you’re welcomed to and we are going to compare the welcoming of the homepage to two things. How it feels to open a traditional dictionary and how it feels to open a traditional website. For that comparison we’re going to use MLB.com (baseball is my favorite sport and the season just started and I’ve been spending a lot of time on MLB.com).

https://www.dictionary.com/ versus Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage.

To begin, let’s explore the homepage of Dictionary.com. The homepage of Dictionary.com appears to be wanting to do two things. To be a search engine, for words, of course, and a news site, for, well, words. Dictionary.com appears to take great pride in being “The Dictionary for the real world” meaning that it seems to challenge the idea that traditional dictionaries are just for the highly educated, meanwhile Dictionary.com’s dictionary is for the modern day human being who just needs to know the meaning of a word.  

The homepage shows a Word of a day meaning they want users to keep coming back to their homepage every day to see what the word of the day is. There is also a button on the bottom that allows you to sign up for their mailing list to get word of the day sent directly to your email’s inbox!

Scrolling further down there are trending words, some articles about popular meme words.

then other websites owned and operated by IXL learning. It seems like Dictionary.com is leaning heavily into being a modern day website, a website they want people to make their own personal homepage when opening up their web browser first thing in the morning. 

This is important as we have to understand the guise of this kind of tactic. A normal dictionary, like the one listed below, isn't trying to disturb you're everyday usage of a dictionary. You open up a dictionary, look for the word, close the book and move on with life. Dictionary.com is actively trying to keep you on their website, to gain traffic as this does two things. One, keeping people on a website longer means more people are viewing ads, even if they aren't intentionally viewing ads. This means that Dictionary.com is generating ad revenue. The second reason is that if people are on Dictionary.com and traffic is high and traffic stays for a long time. Web crawlers, used by Google.com or Bing.com will pick up on this traffic, and it'll be more likely that word definitions will come directly from Dictionary.com instead of another publisher, like the one we will review below.   

Compared to a Webster’s dictionary. Simply said, Webster is trying to do anything crazy with their physical book. Webster’s cover is simple and clear, conveying that this is just a dictionary.  

Flipping to the first page, Webster shows a quick and simple “how to use a dictionary guide”. As the author notes, I did not know some of these dictionary features until after reading this.

 

It then leads into the history of the Webster dictionary and a preface, but after a few pages of tutorial Webster leads a no BS approach into what they’re trying to do. Define words. The first section is letter A. The last section is letter Z. With every word, definition, and use case listed perfectly for the reader. We will dig deeper into this dictionary in the future.

How can using dictionary.com help an English learner or general user with the form of grammar syntax?
Verb: 

We are going to start with a verb and see how dictionary.com teaches and demonstrates how a verb is used. For this example we will use the verb “to sit”. As we see here, dictionary.com actually provides two versions of the verb. The American English version of the verb ‘to sit’ and the British English version of ‘to sit’. 

Shown here we can see that dictionary.com provides all forms of the verb to sit, including, sate, which normally only used in spoken language

It provides lots of examples on how this verb is used, including how it’s used with objects, verb phrases, and idioms.

 

 

As we scroll down we even see Etymology, which may have been left over when Oxford published this website.

 

Lastly, which I find the most important, it provides examples of this verb being used in the real world, which we will review later on in this blog. nce between regular verbs and irregular verbs. Example being go versus goes. A lot of

Thoughts of verb teaching of Dictionary.com

Overall, how dictionary.com teaches verbs (at least in this single use case) is to be very good. Compared to a traditional dictionary, dictionary.com takes full advantage that it is an online dictionary with unlimited webpage space. Dictionary.com provides the reader, learner, and/or user with ample examples so they can use their chosen verb with confidence. While a traditional dictionary is bound by the physical limitations of the page space, so they must only provide the most useful information. On the contrary dictionary.com can provide the user with information they may not know they need. This is especially useful for learners who are learning English as dictionary.com provides examples of how the verb ‘to sit’ can be used with objects, which may be confusing for someone who is just learning English. However, as we will explore in the later part of this review, this could be a problem as it may provide too many examples of someone who is just learning English. 

 

Noun:
Moving onto a noun, we will use the noun teacher. Compared to a verb, a noun is a lot more limited. Looking at the attached photograph, we can see that the verb teacher only has one definition. This definition is fair and alright in its own right, but it feels like compared to a noun, dictionary.com could have provided more information. I think it could had provided examples of words that teachers like, such as professor, instructor, or educator  

 

 It provides other word forms, but one of the examples of another word form is “nonteacher” which I don’t see anyone, especially an English learner using. For nouns, dictionary.com gets the job done, but I think other resources may be useful if you want to get more out of a noun. 

Adjective and Adverb:
For this, we will be combining adjectives and adverbs into one category, and the word example we will use will be fast to show how fast we can find words on dictionary.com. Just like verbs, dictionary.com does a very good job at providing very important and useful information on adjectives and adverbs. 

Dictionary.com provides synonyms and antonyms for fast and even provides other versions of fast, like fast or fastest. 

 It shows how fact can be used to describe “moving or able to move, operate, function, or take effect quickly; quick; swift; rapid: a fast pain reliever;” or “done in comparatively little time; taking a comparatively short time: fast work.” or even that fast can be used in relation to time.

 

For an English learner, this is a great resource as it shows how English can have 10+ different ways to use a single word and this website shows how these ways are used in conjunction with everyday speech and writing. But again, this may be too much and may be overwhelming for someone who is just learning to speak English.

Preposition: 
For this we’re using the preposition “in” and to my pleasant surprise, dictionary.com clearly states the most common use of this word is in its Preposition form and also shows how it can be used as both an adjective and adverb

Just as in the previous section, it provides many use cases on how in is used, such as being in a space or place, inclusion, or what it means (in English). 

This is a great resource for English learners. The biggest complaint I have is that maybe this has too much information just for just a preposition. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s important to have all of the information, but explaining how in is used as a adjective can confuse English learners. 

Determiner:
Our last section for how it teaches English words (form) is how it classifies and teaches determiners. For this, we will use the word ‘the’. The word ‘the’ on dictionary.com clearly shows that the word ‘the’ is a definite article. This is important, especially for someone learning English, to differentiate between an infinite article and definite article. 

How does dictionary.com show meaning of words? 

We are going to combine all major parts of speech into this one section as a dictionary and to the same extent, this website’s main goal is to show meaning of words and how they’re used (how Dictionary.com shows how words are used will be in a later section of this review). 

So how does Dictionary.com show the meaning of words?

Unlike a traditional novel where you are bound by the physical limits of how quickly you can flip through pages to find your word (and even then there is a small chance, given the year this dictionary was published that your work is not in the dictionary). With dictionary.com you can easily use either your keyboard, text to speech or your personal cellphone camera can look up words and definitions. Dictionary.com also has the advantage of being able to add any words they want without having to publish a whole new book. This allows dictionary.com to have an advantage on pop culture as it allows them to take advantage of the hype that may come from meme words. 

 

The one massive disadvantage that Dictionary.com is missing and should take full advantage of is the fact that Dictionary.com is a website and can be used as a search engine. I’m not searching for a search engine like Google.com, but a search engine for words and parts of speech for words. An example is looking up what the difference between effect vs affect yields no results, which is a shame and missed opportunity. Dictionary.com does not have any of these types of resources on their website that one can use to search for these types of nuances in words. The only way to find the difference between effect vs affect is to search for one of the words, scroll all the way to the bottom to the commonly confused which only displays the word affect.

However, the overall way Dictionary.com shows the meaning of words is very strong and provides ample examples. How these words are used and how examples are used will be listed below. 

How does Dictionary.com show and teach how words are used everyday?

This is one of Dictionary.com’s strongest features. Unlike a traditional dictionary, Dictionary.com has the ability to have endless and limitless space to display almost EVERY single use case a word may have. They can even provide more nuance and niche case uses of words. Like showing the preposition in, can also be used as a verb or adjective. 

 

Another problem that I found is that Dictionary.com does not do a great job at explaining the difference between regular verbs and irregular verbs. Example being go versus goes. A lot of English verbs in their past participle will go from something like ‘help’ to ‘helped’ but a lot of English verbs change how they look in the past participle, like ‘go’ and ‘goes’ and ‘write’ vs ‘wrote/written’. Dictionary.com does show these being used in example sentences but does not explain how these words are formed and English learners may be confused 

Overall rating and would I approve of using dictionary.com for all of your dictionary needs? 

If you’re looking for a dictionary that takes advantage of the fact that it is online by providing not only the information you’re looking for, but also more information such as fun facts and other case uses of a word, then dictionary.com is 100% the place for you. 

However, this resource fits better for someone who may already have a decent understanding of English as there are a lot of resources for a single word. If an English learner doesn’t understand that words like ‘in’ can be a proposition and verb, they may not fully understand the meaning of the word in a specific context and as such, an English learner dictionary may be better. 

 Common Counter-Argument

I want to use this last section here to argue against one of my most peer-reviewed counter-argument for my final review and that is "If dictionary.com has unlimited webpage space for text, shouldn't dictionary.com provide all case-uses, such as words like 'non-teacher' or how 'in' can be used as a verb?"

 

I want to start off by saying yes, that is quite a strong counter-argument for my final review. With unlimited space comes unlimited potential to post everything and anything about a certain chosen word. However, Dictionary.com clearly states on their homepage that their dictionary is for the 'real world'. This means that people of all different backgrounds, native English speakers, ESL teachers or people learning English as a second language will be taking full advantage of your dictionary. If one is going to be the dictionary of the real world, why would it be important to add definitions that are almost never used in the real world. In my 26-years of hearing and speaking English, the first time I've even come along the word 'non-teacher' was during this critical review of a dictionary. This kind of unlimited web-space can be misused and confuse anyone trying to use this dictionary.

 

This isn't saying that adding these kinds of words are non-important, but it is important to note that the words being omitted, like words that can have similar use cases, like 'professor', 'educator' or 'mentor' is entirely missed.

 

With this, I still stand by final augmentative review of Dictionary.com.    

 

Dictionary.com is a fun dictionary meant to draw in view and clicks from everyone trying to use the English dictionary. If you're looking for a modern day dictionary, trying to learn meme language or trying to keep up-to-date all of the lingo and jargon coming out from politicians mouths today, then this dictionary is for this type of user.

 

If you're trying to use Dictionary.com as a place to learn everyday language, especially if you're trying to learn English as a second language, then the overwhelming amount of material on the website may actually become a hindrance and the actual useful knowledge someone is looking for will be hidden underneath all the meme words and trendy articles.