I'm looking for the perfect dictionary.

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No, it won't take a million years. I have it completed now, but I want to make it more friendly to even more people. And I'll be learning everything at the same time... I'm looking for a dictionary; it doesn't have to be an encyclopedia.

I just checked. An individual subscription to the online edition of the OED costs $300 for a years worth of access.

how about jsut buying it in hard copy? And asking them to email me with all new words added to it?

Hmm, I looked on Amazon, the hard copy version has 20 volumes (books) and costs over $800. :O

Also, I think that it might not have some things you're looking for: All the first/last names and song titles. I'm not sure though.

But yeah, your local library might have one that you can look through. Or university, if you're enrolled.

Cool.

Oh, btw... it has to have EVERYTHING everything. It has to have "slop hopper", "Susy Q", "Lux soap", "Vicoden", "Dr. Phil", "Mr. Clean", "Autism Speaks", "captive bead ring", "Luna Lovegood", "merry miss", "yuppie", "Bloody Caesar", "dontdatehimgirl.com", "frack", "Kit Kat", business chains, well-known businesses, schools, hospitals, libraries, streets, names of guards at Auschwitz and prisoners who rebelled... even the actors that playedd minor roles in minor films and the starters of websites like dontdatehimgirl.com and wrongplanet.net. Well, i sort of doubt that. But I'll take what I can get.


Does it have every word Wikipedia has and more?

what you're looking for is called the Internet... There's no way a dictionary could keep current on slang, because half the point of slang is changing it when 'uncool' people learn the terms...

The lyrics to dang near everything are on the net. There used to be a site called OLGA (online guitar Archive...I think) that had lyrics and chords for everything. There was a site in Africa that had all the lyrics, but it moved so much I lost it.

You can look up anything that people can think of on the web. Within limits...if you get too specific, the search engines don't find it...

I'm not using it to look up stuff.

Do any of you know of a way I can list everything in the world (within reason-- not "the bowl on the table in the house of Jane Doe on Baker Street"), and everyone in the world (within reason-- people who had at least 15 minutes of fame or a lifetime of fame in their hometown), in order of importance to people?

The closest way I can think of involves a data analysis of Wikipedia. Download the entire wikipedia database (they offer this service), and then write a program to rank all articles in order of how many times they've been edited. This will serve as a proxy for "Importance." However, it won't perfect.. it's likely it will just be a proxy for "Importance + Degree of Controversy + Other stuff."

Well, you could always become psychic and learn to achieve an absolute awareness of all human thoughts and dialogue (those communicating in English, I presume) and then filter out the unwanted information, extracting only new terminology as you define it on a personal level. After all, we must determine what constitutes a legitimate word, and what is useless jargon, nonsense, or has not enough popularity to be considered a part of our language. In the time it took you to read this, at least a dozen new words have probably taken root somewhere in the world. Good luck with all of that. Personally, I just use the internet and dictionaries that are already available.

Hmmm, thanks; that's a great idea! So I'll need to learn how to program... and do you know if there's a way to get all new articles in Wikipedia emailed to you?

Oh yeah; could I do it with number of hits rather than number of times it's been edited?


So I'd also have the other dictionary; I'd add them immediately to my theory if they were common ones and search for all those words on Wikipedia if they weren't common ones and if they weren't in Wikipedia then I'd make a note of it in the Oxford English Dictionary you mentioned with a highlighter and a bookmark...


Never mind me; I'm thinking out loud.

It looks like there's a guy out there who has already done some of this data analysis. Unfortunately, as I write this message, his site seems to be down (There's a database error message).

http://tools.wikimedia.de/%7Eleon/stats/wikicharts/ (Main Page)
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/w ... iki=enwiki (Top 100 by # of views)

Here's some more jumping off parts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... e_download
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics

They add about 2,000 new articles every day. :O

Wikipedia gets 2000 articles every day, you mean?


Oh, goody, there's also Wiktionary. I can also check all the words in the OED against that!


Oh, and do you know when they'll be done adding articles?


Hmm, to get all the actors I can use imdb.com... Google Maps for all the street names...


I just want to learn, document and use everything!