Howdy,

I've developed the AWord dictionary for Nokia smartphones, and I wonder if there is a particular feature that you folks would deem essential in an English-English dictionary?

I'm a Finn myself and as a target audience had in mind mostly myself and my own children who are learning English as a foreign language. I'm proud to say that currently the most ardent fan of my dictionary application is my own 15 year old son who started reading fantasy/scifi books in English with the help of it. One-handed operation is a big part of the attraction, as one does not need to lay the book down to look up a word.

Best Regards,

Grego
http://mpaja.com/

Variant spellings. For example, words ending in 'or' or 'our' such as savio(u)r, neighbo(u)r, harbo(u)r, etc. Generally the spelling of such words is different in Britain, Australia, Canada, South Africa, etc to the Webster's standard American spelling because those countries follow the spelling received from French rather than the Latin spelling adopted by Webster.

Synonyms could be useful as well.

Welcome to you, Grego, and congratulations on your remarkable accomplishment!
I have no idea of what would need to be done, but I should think one of the most difficult things would be homonyms; can you tell a dictionary user to look for context?

Both variant spellings and synonyms are handled pretty well as the underlying database from WordNet includes that information.

For example, looking up "harbor" or "harbour" give a similar display on the phone than if you follow the link: harbor

Grego
http://mpaja.com/

Hi Jackie, and thanks for the encouragements. As to your question on homonyms, the way it is currently is that homographs are automatically displayed, but for homophones there is no solution. So if you look for 'pair' you will not find 'pear.'

Homophones could be looked up by indexing also on pronunciation... I have to think about that!