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Thank you so much for the kind comment! I really appreciate it. Yes, it is fun to just keep clicking and see where it goes. I actually did some ranking to me

Thank you so much for the kind comment! I really appreciate it. Yes, it is fun to just keep clicking and see where it goes. I actually did some ranking to measure the connectivity of words in the dictionary that I used. I made this little word cloud to show off the most highly connective non-trivial words: https://imgur.com/iqJ1Iwb https://imgur.com/iqJ1Iwb

lioeters 9y ago
Fascinating.. Looking at the visualization of "highly connective words", my mind automatically tried to find some pattern or sense in those particular words - why are they the most connective? Does it mean that there are the most number of definitions that contain (and are related to) these words? I wonder if that signifies something about the "culture" of the English language, what people most often think/talk about when using it (edit: cats apparently! :). As a side note, something that struck me when I first visited treegle.xyz, was that the definition of "quarrel" included the word "etc." in it: quarrel - a small opening in window tracery, of which the cusps, etc., make the form nearly square The use of this "etc." bugs me for some reason: it seems to assume that the reader knows how a window tracery is built, and the word adds no value to the definition - and makes me wonder what components other than "cusps" they meant. Anyway, wonderful experiment (and project name too).
- dictionaryfeed 9y ago
  Thank you again! I really appreciate all of your thoughtful feedback. Yeah, one way of measuring connectivity is counting how many definitions that a word appears in. Also, yeah, sometimes there are text artifacts in definitions and words, phrases, or abbreviations that don't add any value to the definition. From research that I've done, this happens in online dictionaries (not often, but occasionally). I've done a lot of work to clean up the definitions in my dictionary and provide the top ranking definitions first, but some artifacts still slip through the cracks. I really appreciate all of your great feedback and welcome any comments or discussion anytime! :)
marktangotango 9y ago
What dictionary did you use, what's its license? Last time I checked all the dictionary publishers with APIs had restrictive licenses.
- dictionaryfeed 9y ago
  I used Online Plain Text English Dictionary. It's public domain and based on Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913). I had to do quite a bit of cleaning and statistics to improve the definition formatting and ordering. If you're interested in dictionaries and would like to chat sometime, please send me a message. I would love to. :)

lioeters 9y ago

Fascinating.. Looking at the visualization of "highly connective words", my mind automatically tried to find some pattern or sense in those particular words - why are they the most connective? Does it mean that there are the most number of definitions that contain (and are related to) these words? I wonder if that signifies something about the "culture" of the English language, what people most often think/talk about when using it (edit: cats apparently! :). As a side note, something that struck me when I first visited treegle.xyz, was that the definition of "quarrel" included the word "etc." in it: quarrel - a small opening in window tracery, of which the cusps, etc., make the form nearly square The use of this "etc." bugs me for some reason: it seems to assume that the reader knows how a window tracery is built, and the word adds no value to the definition - and makes me wonder what components other than "cusps" they meant. Anyway, wonderful experiment (and project name too).

dictionaryfeed 9y ago
Thank you again! I really appreciate all of your thoughtful feedback. Yeah, one way of measuring connectivity is counting how many definitions that a word appears in. Also, yeah, sometimes there are text artifacts in definitions and words, phrases, or abbreviations that don't add any value to the definition. From research that I've done, this happens in online dictionaries (not often, but occasionally). I've done a lot of work to clean up the definitions in my dictionary and provide the top ranking definitions first, but some artifacts still slip through the cracks. I really appreciate all of your great feedback and welcome any comments or discussion anytime! :)

marktangotango 9y ago

What dictionary did you use, what's its license? Last time I checked all the dictionary publishers with APIs had restrictive licenses.

dictionaryfeed 9y ago
I used Online Plain Text English Dictionary. It's public domain and based on Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913). I had to do quite a bit of cleaning and statistics to improve the definition formatting and ordering. If you're interested in dictionaries and would like to chat sometime, please send me a message. I would love to. :)