Tuesday, June 10, 2008

online tools

The Firefox search bar is a wonderful thing. I use Firefox because of the beauty of open source, but I also love it for making amazing translation tools easy to use. The search I use most is Wordreference. I set up a separate one for Sp>En and one for En>Sp. If you don't already have it you also must must set one up for the all powerful RAE. There's the obvious dictionary.com (actually, to get there in firefox you can just type dict and the word in the address bar), and thesaurus.com. There's also definr. For fun I like the urban dictionary. What I've given you so far are links to the main sites for these pages. Some of these, like wordreference (at the very bottom of a page once you look up a word), have quick links on their pages for adding it to your firefox search bar. The RAE search is here (huge kudos to the designer). For others go here and search for them under all add-ons (lots of other cool ones to get while you're there).

Not in the search bar but also cool: Visuwords graphs a word's relationship to other words. The visual dictionary is good for learning terminology for tests (in theory these types of dictionaries are also good for when you know what it looks like and not what it's called - though I've never had much luck using them that way). If, like me, you still wonder if you want to lie or lay down, check out confusing words. And for pronunciation dudas try the cool collective project of forvo.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for remember us, Sara. :)

BTW, Forvo is a spanish project so you can imagine the quality of the pronunciations there in spanish is quite good.

Dan Feder said...

Don't forget proz.com! Good for very technical terminology, especially in government, corporate and engineering areas.

http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=Proz

Sara Koopman said...

absolutely. I've blogged a good bit about proz and was trying not to be repetitive, but by all means use proz regularly. bummer that there's no way to put it in the firefox search bar that I know of. they have their own search bar you can download but it takes up too much screen space for my taste.

Anonymous said...

Muchos muchos gracias Sarah - great tools that I probably wouldn't have found so easily.