Look It Up

Google's new Dictionary, announced last week, spurred me to poke around comparing online dictionaries.

For simplicity, speed and its cute tagline, my favorite may be Ninjawords which uses Wiktionary as a source.
If you like it, note that you can search it just by adding your word to the end of the URL (example: http://ninjawords.com/idyll) or you can add Ninjawords to the toolbar search box in Firefox or Internet Explorer 7.

Ninjawords does not offer etymologies, though, which are dear to my heart, nor other extras like pronunciation. Most major online dictionaries, do offer these things, but usually all useful information is so deeply embedded in a chaotic thicket of ads, it's hard to see what you are looking for. Two of the worst offenders are Merriam-Webster and The Free Dictionary.

I found Your Dictionary.com to be slightly better. It still has a lot of ads, but the layout makes it a little easier to see where to start reading. It does have etymologies with links and, at the bottom, a nice interface for browsing nearby definitions and related expressions.
Google wins the prize for clean and easy-to-read, however. Their new Dictionary offers a characteristically excellent layout with no ads. It looks great, and you can save a starred list of words (when you're logged in to a Google account). The list of related phrases is nice, too, but you do have to consult a further source for etymology which is a big annoyance to me. For my test word, "juvenile," the list of web definition links at the end of Google's entry was lengthy but not necessarily high-quality. Also, my original more obscure test word, "juvenescence," got very limited results from Google.

Now, of course, if you're a Mac user, you have access to the Oxford American Dictionary entries through your Dashboard widget, which does offer fairly good definitions and etymologies. And there are surely other digital options out there, too, none of them perfect and few of them with the beautiful section of illustrations in the back of the 1872 Webster's I recently rescued from the trash heap. Plus, there's just something nice about flipping through paper pages to find what you want and probably other diverting words along the way.