The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group
WordGenius Dictionary
Ash Nallawalla
ash@melbpc.org.au


Ash Nallawalla tells us about two dictionary products released in the USA abd Australia by an Australian company

WordGenius, a division of Eurofield Information Solutions (EIS), an Australian company, has just released Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (315,000 entries) in the US. In Australia, we get instead the Macquarie Dictionary, WordGenius Edition (110,000 entries), although I reviewed the former, courtesy of Technopolis Communications. Both work identically. I have also included the screen shots of a 30-day, trial copy of the Australian version. The software has been released to coincide with the start of our school year.

The WordGenius dictionary is based on the Consensus award-winning (sponsored by IBM and Microsoft) EIS eComPress electronic dictionary publishing technology. eComPress is used to compress, encode and index the dictionary. Its size always remains compressed to less than 14 MB, thus saving valuable disk space and lookup time. You can run it on any Windows operating system from Windows 95 onwards.

In Use
Installation was quick and painless. I was asked for the licensed user name and a key for my single user copy. You can also get it in networked versions so that, for example, a school can make it available to all its staff and students.

The dictionary has an optional icon that you place anywhere on your screen desktop and you drag a word onto it to see its meaning. This opens a small window containing the dictionary and a definition of the word. There is a reverse dictionary too, so you can search for words within definitions.



Figure 1. The drag-on icons of the Australian and US editions
 



Figure 2. Setup screen




Figure 3. Checking the work "organisation" in both editions.
 
You can check a word from any Windows program, such as a Web browser, a PDF file, word processor, spreadsheet and so on. Since the selected word does not literally travel with the mouse pointer, it can be disconcerting at first when you see an error symbol when your pointer is between the application window and the dictionary icon. If you run all your applications full-screen, unlike me, you won't see this phenomenon.

If you cannot spell a word, you can use Boolean (and, or) or Wildcard (?, *) searches, which can also help you to solve crosswords.

As you can see in the screen shots, the US and Australian dictionaries are different, being derived from the Webster and Macquarie dictionaries respectively. You can also select the pronounciation text of the defined word and hear it through your PC speakers. Not surprisingly, the US and Australian versions pronounce the word to suit their local usage.

I tried entering an Australian spelling (organisation) into the Webster's dictionary and it did not show the US equivalent (organization). Similarly, when I entered the US spelling in the Macquarie version or the US spelling in the Webster's edition showed both variants. Using wildcards can help in such situations. This dictionary will make a fine addition to your electronic library, as it solves your need much faster than its paper counterpart.

Availability

The unabridged Macquarie WordGenius dictionary in its non-networked version sells for $49.95 but the concise version is only $19.95. Additional information about EIS and its other products is available at http://www.eis.com.au. This site has a link to the US Web site, should you need the Random House Webster's edition.



Figure 4. You can hear the pronunciation of words if you wish

Reprinted from the Jan / Feb 2006 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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