The Society for Technical Communication is an individual membership organization dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences of technical communication. It is the largest organization of its type in the world. Its 25,000 members include technical writers and editors, content developers, documentation specialists, technical illustrators, instructional designers, academics, information architects, usability and human factors professionals, visual designers, Web designers and developers, and translators - anyone whose work makes technical information available to those who need it.

The STC Toronto Chapter was founded in 1959 (then the Society of Technical Writers) and is the largest chapter in Canada.

About this Newsletter:

The Wandering Eye
Dictionaries
by Keith Soltys

Most technical writers own at least one dictionary, even though they may keep them tucked discretely out of sight. With the advent of the Internet, a whole shelf of dictionaries can now be just a discrete mouse-click away.

The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary is the favourite of many technical writers, because it's up-to-date and has good coverage of technical terms. It's no surprise then, that Merriam-Webster Online is one of the best dictionary sites on the Web. The free portion of the site includes a dictionary and thesaurus. If you buy the Collegiate dictionary, you get a one-year subscription to the online version of that dictionary. As for me, I've purchased a subscription to the Unabridged dictionary, which also includes other reference tools, including a style guide and an encyclopedia. It's something that I use a lot, and it's easier to use the online dictionary than to struggle with fine print and a heavy book. Microsoft has a dictionary as part of its Encarta line of reference products; it has a useful feature that shows you the nearest words around the one you selected.

The Oxford English Dictionary is the most comprehensive English-language dictionary, but unfortunately the online version is a subscription service only, and a fairly pricey one - a month's subscription is about the same price as a year's subscription to Merriam-Webster. For a British alternative to Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage Dictionary, there are a couple of Oxford dictionaries online: the Oxford Advanced Learners' Dictionary and the The Compact Oxford Dictionary at AskOxford.com, which has some other useful language resources. As far as I've been able to find out, neither the Canadian Oxford Dictionary or the Gage Canadian Dictionary are online, which is a shame.

There are many dictionary meta-sites that link to or search multiple dictionaries. yourDictionary.com, formerly a Web of On-line Dictionaries, has a large collection of links to online dictionaries in many languages and in many subject areas (warning: I found the site to be quite slow). OneLook Dictionary Search lets you search many dictionaries at once. The Acronym Finder isn't a dictionary per se, but extremely useful nonetheless, considering the number of acronyms that technical writers have to deal with. LOGOS will translate the word you search for into several languages, but I found the interface confusing.

There are many specialized and technical dictionaries on the Web. A Dictionary of Units bills itself as "a summary of most of the units of measurement to be found in use around the world today". For those in the computer industry, there are several good technical dictionaries, including the Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing, the Tech Encyclopedia, published by CMP's TechWeb, the Webopedia dictionary of Internet and computer terms, and the Netdictionary of mostly Internet terms. NetLingo and Whatis.com are another couple of sites that specialize in Internet- and computer-related terms. Writers who have to work with the military or its contractors can refer to the DOD Dictionary of Military Terms.

Finally, here's yet another way of using Google - as a dictionary or glossary. You can precede your search with the words "what is" or "what are". You'll get a web definition, followed by a list of relevant links. If you precede your search with the operator "define:", Google will include all of the definitions that it finds on the web. You can find out more about this kind of search on Google Guide.

Even if you don't explicitly ask for a definition, Google includes a link to a definition, if it finds one, in the statistics section at the top of the page. I've been using Google for years, and I never noticed this until I started researching this article.

Keith Soltys has been working as a technical writer for 16 years, and is currently at the Toronto Stock Exchange. He maintains the Internet Resources for Technical Communicators web site and has recently started a weblog. He lives in Pickering with his wife, two children, a cat, and an ever growing collection of Grateful Dead CDs.

Next Article