Last week, in Draft 4 Revisited, I remembered James Somers’ wonderful article on You’re probably using the wrong dictionary. The right dictionary, it turns out, is Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913 + 1828) but you really need to read Somers’ article to find out why. In a long series of posts starting with Irreal’s original 2015 post, we discovered an online version of the dictionary, mourned its passing, and discovered a way to add it Emacs.
Now, Tim Heaney over at OYLENSHPEEGUL appears to have independently discovered this dictionary and another means of using it from within Emacs. As with the solution described in Irreal, you can also access the dictionary from the command line or even a GUI app.
As I’ve said before, if you write prose of any sort, you really need this dictionary and you really need to read Somers’ article and John McPhee’s Draft No. 4 that started the whole thing. It will open your eyes to a better way of editing your text.