{"id":7797,"date":"2019-01-29T14:11:41","date_gmt":"2019-01-29T19:11:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=7797"},"modified":"2019-01-29T14:18:37","modified_gmt":"2019-01-29T19:18:37","slug":"zamansky-56-dictionaries-and-thesauri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=7797","title":{"rendered":"Zamansky 56: Dictionaries and Thesauri"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mike Zamansky has another video up in his Using Emacs Series<\/a>. This time it\u2019s about dictionary and thesaurus apps for Emacs<\/a>. Like many of us\u2014or, perhaps, most of us\u2014Zamansky uses Emacs for almost every chore that involves text: he reads and writes his email with it, he reads his RSS feed with it, and he writes his blog with it. Up until now, he hasn\u2019t integrated a dictionary app into his workflow. He usually just switches to his browser and looks up the word in one of the on-line dictionaries.<\/p>\n

That, he says, is kind of lame so he wants to be able to look up words from Emacs. I\u2019ve been doing that ever since abo-abo introduced his excellent define-word<\/a> package. I use it multiple times a day either to check a definition or as a backup to flyspell, which on my machine takes a conservative view and often produces false positives. Its use is so integrated into my workflow that even when I\u2019m not in Emacs, I\u2019ll switch to it so I can look up a word. I get annoyed when I\u2019m on my iPad or iPhone and have to use some other method of looking up a word.<\/p>\n

Zamansky settled on the dictionary<\/a> package. It\u2019s a nice package and easy to use. It\u2019s also more flexible than define-word<\/code> because it can handle several dictionaries. You can even have a local dictionary server if you\u2019re off-line a lot.<\/p>\n

For his thesaurus, he looked at powerthesaurus<\/a> and synosaurus<\/a>. He settled on synosaurus while I\u2019m using powerthesaurus. Either one seems a good choice. Synosaurus can use either a local thesaurus (Wordnet<\/a>, which must be installed separately) or the on-line OpenThesaurus<\/a>, which does not appear to support English synonyms.<\/p>\n

I found this video particularly useful. In the first place, it reminded me about the try<\/a> package, which is useful to easily experiment with packages before committing them to your configuration. Because Zamansky learned about powerthesaurus from Irreal, it\u2019s a nice bit of what goes around comes around that I learned something about the package from his video. It turns out the powerthesaurus-lookup-word-dwim<\/code> command is much more useful than the powerthesaurus-lookup-word<\/code> command that I had been using.<\/p>\n

Finally, no discussion of Emacs dictionaries could be complete without\u2014again\u2014mentioning Draft #4<\/a> and why you are probably using the wrong dictionary. If you do any type of creative writing you should definitely follow the above link and see what you\u2019re missing. Pointers for installing the 1913 + 1828 Webster\u2019s Revised Unabridged Dictionary and the necessary software is available here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The video is just short of eleven and a half minutes so it should fit easily into a coffee break. If you don\u2019t yet have a dictionary and thesaurus interface in Emacs you should definitely watch this video. Even if you do have apps installed, watch it anyway: you may, like me, learn something new.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mike Zamansky has another video up in his Using Emacs Series. This time it\u2019s about dictionary and thesaurus apps for Emacs. Like many of us\u2014or, perhaps, most of us\u2014Zamansky uses Emacs for almost every chore that involves text: he reads … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-7797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7797"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7800,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7797\/revisions\/7800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}