The Lexico Blog

Hi, I’m Barbara Ann Kipfer, PhD., editor and compiler of Roget’s New Millenium Thesaurus. The synonym “weaker sex” appears in many thesauruses for terms like woman, lady, and female. It is considered an informal, possibly derogatory, synonym for those words. Due to the way our search technology works, a search for weaker appeared to suggest that it was a synonym for female and lady. This was incorrect and has been fixed.

We take your concerns about language and society seriously (this is, after all, our business) and after reading feedback on the entries for female and lady, we carefully reviewed our editorial decisions. In light of how our customers use Thesaurus.com on a daily basis, we chose to remove “weaker sex” as a informal/slang synonym from our site. The entries now describe current American English usage more accurately and we feel we’re providing more helpful suggestions for those seeking guidance on word choice from us.

We apologize for any confusion this situation may have caused and hope you’ll stay in touch with us as we strive to improve all the learning resources we provide on Thesaurus.com, Dictionary.com and Reference.com.

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Have you heard the news? Audio pronunciations are now free on Dictionary.com. Look up a word and click on the speaker icon to hear how to say it.

Illustrations are free now too.

And we won’t bother you with pop-under advertising anymore.

Sorry it took us so long to get back to you. When faced with a challenging economy and pressures to monetize every nook and cranny of your business, it pays to listen to your customers to learn what they truly need. So here we are.

How can we be more useful for you?

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As a lexicographer, I share the common frustration of trying to find the word for what you mean, locating the precise word for what you want to say. For those like me who have an idea, concept, or definition but who do not know, cannot remember, or are uncertain of the word, we offer help in the form of the Dictionary.com Reverse Dictionary.

The Reverse Dictionary is a creativity and idea generator, entertainment, inspiration, a vocabulary builder, word puzzle and game help, word/name/place finder, and a writing aid for browsers, businesspeople, consumers, students, trivia buffs, word-game players, and writers.

The Reverse Dictionary tries to take the user from “meaning” to “word” rather than the conventional, alphabetical format where you have to know the word and thereby are given its meaning. If you don’t know the word, it is hard to look it up in an alphabetical dictionary, even online. The Reverse Dictionary helps in those instances where you struggle to recall something and it continues to elude you.

You can shake the answers out of your memory with the Reverse Dictionary. The answers or “target” words have been carefully selected to exclude extremely easy or extremely hard words but rather to envelop the range of words that can elude users so easily. The “cue/clue” words are carefully framed in ways that make the “target” words readily findable. Those “cue/clue” words lead into the definitions of the “target” words and the compiler has chosen familiar words that users would think of when trying to recall the “target” words.

Though it would be impractical to provide every possible “cue/clue” to a “target” word, the Reverse Dictionary seeks out the most probable and generative choices. Even if you have never used a reverse dictionary, it’s easy to learn what constitutes useful and less useful “cue/clue” words. Good bets are the more concrete “cues/clues” like ear, church, office, clear, emotion, and soften. Less useful “cues/clues” would generate too many entries: tiny, first, fat are cues/clues which could describe hundreds of “target” words.

We do not attempt to give a complete definition or description of every word in the Reverse Dictionary search results; instead, we give you just enough information to identify the word or phrase you’re looking for, with a link to look up the full definition - at Dictionary.com, of course.

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Ubiquitous, that is, assuming you take your mobile phone everywhere — and I do. A ubiquitous thesaurus, encyclopedia, and general reference library as well. How cool is that? (The quantification of cool is always a tricky matter, but in my professional opinion it’s pretty cool.) I’m not just tooting our own horn here. In fact I don’t even think we have a horn. Though we do have Guitar Hero. (Yes, Lexico is a fun place to work.) You should check it out. And here I am referring back to the mobile site, not Guitar Hero (but check that out as well if you’re so inclined). Just point your mobile browser to dictionary.com. It’s clean, fast and simple — the very antithesis of my blog entry. Much better than our previous mobile site, which I note only because I led its development back in 2000, and I’m thrilled to be so soundly one-upped. Kudos to our technical team! And to our users, enjoy!

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Since 1998, our aim at Lexico has been to make learning easy and fun through our work on Dictionary.com, Word of the Day, CleverKeys and other interactive reference tools. Now, as we begin our tenth year as a company, we are opening this blog to let you know about what excites and motivates us, and for us to hear back from you, too. I’m one of the founders and I’ll be sharing this space with the other people who work here to make our offerings useful and enjoyable for you.

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