Wednesday, August 31, 2011

WordWeb: ~~~Totally e-ddictive Dictionary~~~

WordWeb is quite fast, powerful, user friendly, feature-rich international English dictionary for Windows. All the versions are ad-free or any other annoying factors.
OS: It works perfectly with Win 98, XP, 2K or 2K3.
Versatility: It comes in three flavors as below–
Internet (http://www.wordwebonline.com) – no need to download and install software. If you are connected to internet, just go to this site, write the word in Search and get the meaning instantly. This is your online Dictionary. This is updated regularly. At the time of writing this review, the database was updated on 6th February that means 9 days back only. With online feature you have another benefit of finding even the latest words. If it does not get he word in its database it automatically searches in online available other Dictionary databases and shows you the results.
Free Downloadable Version: 10.9MB to be precise when it is installed on your system, and to install you need to download around 9MB of stuff from http://www.wordweb.info. You don’t need to be online to use it. The Free Version is called “free cut-down version of Wordweb Pro software”.
Wordweb Pro Doctionary for which the cost of base product is $19 if you want to download from the site http://www.wordweb.info else $34 if you want a CD delivered at your place. The download file size is 20MB. With Wordweb Pro you have certain add-on features for an add-on cost. The current version available is Wordweb Pro 5. you don’t need to be online to use it.
I use the free version downloaded and installed on my laptop. It is really very handy and useful to me. The salient features of Free Version are:Language Options: you can select from American, International, British, Australian, Canadian and Asian English. The spellings and words will reflect according the option you select.
Ease and Compatibility: it supports Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat as well. Suppose you are in a Word Doc and encounter a difficult word for which you need to find the meaning, just select this word, click on Wordweb Dictionary Icon in you System Tray and Wordweb pops up with the details of that word. When you are in any other product of Microsoft e.g. Excel or Powerpoint etc. you can use the hot key “Ctrl+Alt+W” after selecting the word you want to search. In internet explorer you just highlight the word, right click and select Wordweb, it pops up. And the best thing is you can change the hot key as per your ease by going into options. After you get the results, say 10 meanings for a word, you can select one and click on Replace to replace it in your Doc with the selected one.
Words & Synonyms: There are 150000 words and 120000 synonyms in the free version. For the same word you can see its usage in different parts of speech as Noun, Verb, Adjective and Adverb by selecting the desired choice. There is a button on main window for X-ref which means that if you have other dictionaries installed on your system, it will attempt to find them out and get the meanings out of their database. It shows you pronunciations, related words, usage examples, nearest words, synonyms, type of, type, part, parts of, see also. Let me illustrate it with an example – when I searched for a word “lexicon” it gave me 2 meanings (1. A language user's knowledge of words, and 2. A reference book containing an alphabetical list of words with information about them) , more than 100 nearest words (right from Lenten rose to lile), 3 synonyms (as dictionary, mental lexicon and vocabulary), Parts (showed 6 as citation form, dictionary entry, entry word, headword, lexical entry and main entry word), Type of (9 choices as book of facts, cognition, knowledge, noesis, psychological feature, reference, reference book, reference work and wordbook), Types (17 choices as bilingual dictionary, collegiate dictionary, desk dictionary, etymological dictionary, gazetteer, learner’s dictionary, little dictionary, O.E.D., OED, Oxford English dictionary, pocket dictionary, school dictionary, spellcheck, spell-checker, spelling checker, unabridged, unabridged dictionary), Parts of (2 – language, speech), See Also (lexical). It has an option of Option to hide (default) or flag vulgar and offensive related words
Connect to Wordweb Online: If you are not satisfied with the result produced by the offline free dictionary, you can go to online Wordweb with a click of a button (in help click on Wordweb online) and get more, but it never happened in my case, whatever words I searched I found the desirable result in my offline database.
Add-on features of Webword Pro: Wordweb Pro contains all the features mentioned above plus the following ones:
Tab pages to quickly check web references
Bookmark words
Highlights commonly used widely-understood words
Find words matching a pattern
Edit and add to the database
Solve and find anagrams
Search for words in a large number of optional extra word lists
Add your own custom glossaries
Reverse definition (full text) search
Cross-links words that sound the same (homonyms)
Word pattern finding using a wild card like CR?SH will get you CRUSH and CRASH, *GRY will get you angry and hungry
Anagrams: enter a word and you can get all straight and multiple word anagrams, e.g. protest finds potters, spotter, to strep, pert sot, etc. you can give a word and check how many words can be made using the letters in that word.

And you have an option of reporting an error online by clicking on the option in help.

Wordweb is really trendy, sleek, elegant, easy to use and friendly. My comfort level is 5/5

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