Thursday, May 22, 2014

23 Mobile Things: Thing 18

Education

For this thing, I chose the Advanced English Dictionary & Thesaurus because I love words and learning their meanings and origins. I find it deplorable how so many people in the US have about three adjectives to their name: cool, awesome and sucks.  Our language has such richness, and I try to do what I can to support that.

The app was OK. I found the idea of connecting a word to synonyms, etc. intriguing, as I sometimes struggle to come up with more than one way of saying something to avoid the sin of monotony in writing. I did not see any words listed with synonyms, and at least a few of them could have. For example, I looked at picture. One of the listed meaning described motion pictures.  Well, shouldn't movie be listed as a synonym in that instance? Or film, flick, something? I didn't see any etymology in the definitions, either, and that's very often important in learning a word. It's frequently what I'm looking for!

I must confess I had to go look up definitions for  holonym, meronym, hypernym and hyponym! (There's a hint for the creators - I doubt everyone downloading this app knows them.) I think I'd have a hard time keeping all the "h" words straight...  Once I did that, the app made a whole lot more sense. But it just seems to lack something. For example, the definition of "picumnus" is that it's a genus of Picidae. OK...  I know genus means we're talking biology, but what's Picidae? That word isn't a link, so I had to look it up separately. Turns out it's a kind of woodpecker. That would have been really good to know, without having to take the extra step.

I think this app has a lot of potential, but leaves something to be desired at this time.

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