The Lexicographer's Rules

Man pleads guilty to attacking Joshua Reynolds painting with hammer. “Mark Paton, 44, was arrested Wednesday after repeatedly hitting Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of 18th-century diarist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson.“

Over the weekend I moved the site to a new service provider, one offering incredible high-speed hosting for database-driven web sites (and for less than a third of what I was paying elsewhere for dismal speeds).

EngineHosting has smartly shown that they understand that static web sites will soon be, if they are not already, outnumbered by database-driven web sites. So they’ve paid a lot of attention to making sure that the MySQL servers are top-notch.

As a result, I’ve been able to restore the full-blown search functions which are so very necessary for a site like this one. It makes finding things less painful

Over the next few months, I’ll be making substantial changes to the look and operation of the site, and hope to offer features like:

—rating of entries
—automatic look-ups in dictionaries at other sites
—customized searches across a wide spectrum of freely available online glossaries, lexicons, and dictionaries
—new categories of words being recorded
—RSS feeds for categories and subjects
—integration of unresearched citations and fully-researched entries
—a focus on visitor comments and community

I welcome your comments and suggestions. I do track what visitors do on the site and how they do it, but I’d appreciate your specific, detailed comments about what you’d expect to see here. Leave your suggestions here in the comments or drop me a line at editor@doubletongued.org.

The Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (eDIL) was launched by the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin this week. I've yet to see spend a lot of time with it, but it looks promising.

The very nice "Orange" at Diary of a Crossword fiend has posted a write-up about the New Words Open Mic at the Dictionary Society of North American conference in which I participated Saturday. It was tremendously goofy, as it was supposed to be. Be sure to check the comments—Charles Hodgson of Podictionary talks about how he'll use some material gathered at the conference in upcoming podcasts.

Double-Tongued Dictionary got a mention in the Los Angeles Times today for citing the word alpha kitty.