Double-Tongued Word Wrester, A Live, Growing Online Dictionary, Launches

From the fringes of the English language comes Double-Tongued Word Wrester, a growing, live dictionary, which launches June 1, 2004. The cost-free brand-new site tracks new, unusual, and uncommon words as they pass through common discourse, paying special attention to words borrowed and loaned between English and other languages. Each word is verified, cited, and defined. Fun words, weird words, cool words, but no sniglets or joke words, Double-Tongued Word Wrester picks real, live terms uncovered from internet discussions, weblogs, television transcripts, books, and periodicals.

New York City (PRWEB) June 1, 2004 --Given the hundreds of English dictionaries currently available on the market, one might think we'd have the English language fairly well covered. But of the thousands of new words coined in the English language each year, only relatively few are recorded by the paper dictionaries.

The new online dictionary Double-Tongued Word Wrester ( http://www.doubletongued.org/ ) will change that. The free web site will try to capture, on the fly, those words which will appear in hard-cover dictionaries much later or not at all. Double-Tongued Word Wrester is a live, growing dictionary, snagging new words, rare words, foreign words: any term which passes through the common discourse of the world's Englishes. From New York to Lagos, from Sydney to Toronto, it reflects trends and change, fads and fashion, moods and movements, past and future.

Double-Tongued Word Wrester is a free online project run by Grant Barrett, an American lexicographer for Oxford University Press in New York City. He is also project editor of the "Historical Dictionary of American Slang" and editor of the forthcoming "Hatchet Jobs & Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang." In the past, he ran the noted web site World New York, known for its extracts of interest to urbanites and cited in media around the world. He is a member of the American Dialect Society, the Dictionary Society of North American, and the Linguistic Society of America.

Double-Tongued Word Wrester uses the honed tools of professional lexicography to yank neologisms, buzzwords, and colloquialisms from enormous pools of free-floating information. There are no joke words, no fake definitions, no made up words included only to fill space. With the infinite space of the Internet, there's never a page limit: so anything found can be included, anything unwanted can be cut.

How is it done?

First the word is found. Finding involves complex algorithms which cull and sort different streams and feeds of digital text, looking for key words and phrases which offer clues to the presence of new or unusual terms.

Then the word is researched. After finding candidate words, we delve into private and public full-text digital archives containing billions of words published over the last 300 years. We try to find early uses of the terms, we try to find them used in different ways with difference meanings and nuances, and we try to find, as time permits, the terms' origins.

Then we define the words. We use our research to record citations which give extra substance and meaning to the entries in Double-Tongued Word Wrester and help develop an understanding of how a word is used, what is intended by its speakers, and how best to define it. Using a historical dictionary format, the citations lend depth and structure to words entering or leaving the world's Englishes.

From these citations come the definitions whose development progresses as new information is uncovered, and new dimensions to words or their histories are revealed. Once a word is defined, it is posted to the world at no charge, where it is available for dicussion or comment by everyone. Visitors can relate what they think a word means or offer thoughts on its history or future.

As Double-Tongued Word Wrester grows, its entries will prove to be a great resource for peering into the niches and coves of the world's outlying vernaculars, slangs, and jargons.

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The official launch date of the Double-Tongued Word Wrester web site is June 1, 2004. The web site can be reached at http://www.doubletongued.org/. Double-Tongued Word Wrester is not sponsored by, operated by, or affiliated with Oxford University Press.