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RoadLingua
Reader v3.2 & the WordNet v2.0 Lexicon for Palm
OS & Windows Mobile
Reviewed
by: Lianne
Reitter, March 2004, send
e-mail
Published
by: AbsoluteWord, go
to the web site
Requires: Palm
OS v3.5 or higher, palmOne (Palm Inc.), Handspring, HandEra,
Sony, Kyocera, Acer, Samsung, other PalmOS handhelds;
available for Pocket PC/Windows Mobile
MSRP: $24.95
(WordNet & RoadLingua; over 130 other lexicons available)
I have
a colleague at work who uses big words; not in a phony
way though - he is just really well read and some of the
English he uses is, well, beyond me. When I was a kid,
I would learn the meaning of a new word contextually, by
the way it was used in the sentence. For some reason (too
much pressure and stress at work, meaning that I only listen
to the last half of anything anyone says?), my brain doesn't
work that way any more and I have to look these things
up in a dictionary. Many a conversation has come and gone
and I have left it not really fully understanding some
of what was said because I couldn't parade my ignorance
out in public and pull out a copy of Webster’s or
Oxford (however small and abridged). Absolute Word’s
RoadLingua and WordNet for my PDA to the rescue!
RoadLingua
is actually a dictionary viewer available for both the
Palm and Pocket PC. You don't have to purchase RoadLingua
separately as it comes included with the first lexicon
or dictionary you buy from Absolute Word.
WordNet
is the English dictionary I use in times of need and it
is just as simple to use as you might hope. The interface
is well laid out with a search line at the bottom of the
screen, waiting for your input. Stroke in one letter with
your stylus and the word list immediately scrolls to the
first word in its lexicon starting with that letter. Stroke
in your next letter and the word list scrolls down to the
first word with those two letters and so on until you find
the exact word you are looking for. Once you have found
your word, a simple tap with your stylus displays the definition,
pronunciation, its type or state and any synonyms including
links to any contained in the WordNet dictionary. The description
makes the process sound slow, but it's actually lighting
fast - possibly the fastest database lookup of its kind
we've seen.
A history button to the right of the Search field lets
you quickly scroll through your recent words, and an eraser
icon to the right of that allows you to clear the search
field completely, thereby eliminating the task of laboriously
backstroking the last word or highlighting and deleting
with a backstroke.
Here is a nice feature. You are reading your eBook and
you come across a word you don't understand - something
which doesn't make contextual sense. With RoadLingua and
WordNet installed, you need only highlight the word and
with a quick stroke of the stylus on the Graffiti area
WordNet is launched with your query in the search field
and the definition displayed for you to read. Hide WordNet
again by tapping the icon in the lower right corner of
the screen and go back to enjoying your read. This kind
of program integration is extremely useful.
As
a dictionary, WordNet fairs pretty well. It doesn't have
some of the
more difficult words I threw at it: "coracoid" (a
small reptilian bone), "dittography" (duplication
of letters or symbols), "esplees" (the yield
from land, as rents or produce), "frenate" (to
furnish something with a bridle), "konak" (a
large official Turkish residence), "mafic" (pertaining
to rocks) or "metanoia" (a profound transformation).
But I'm going to forgive those because I did find "frangible", "googol", "lohan", "muliebrity", "oscine" and "plage" – go
ahead, look ’em up! On the other hand it didn't have
some of the really simple words such as "them", "their" and "to",
but really, if you need to look up pronouns and articles
you should really put down your daddy’s PDA before
he catches you playing with it. Mind you, considering the
melting-pot in which we live juxtaposed with the usefulness
and near-ubiquity of PDAs, aren't pronoun definitions a
genuine help to people for whom English is an important
but nonetheless second language? Considering the size of
the dictionary (15 MB and over 145,000 entries) it is mystifying
that everything we use in basic grammatically accurate
English is not completely included.
The
very size of the dictionary means that most Palm OS PDAs
have insufficient
internal memory, but it's not a
problem because RoadLingua is clearly designed to run its
lexicons from storage cards. Installing WordNet to the
storage card is a simple process at HotSync time and having
all your dictionaries on the storage card will cause no
problems for RoadLingua. The dictionaries that can be downloaded
from AbsoluteWord’s web site are numerous. You can
stick with just WordNet, the English dictionary, as I do,
but you can add translation dictionaries for all the top
tier languages (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish,
Japanese), second tier languages (Scandinavia, central & eastern
Europe, Russian, Portuguese), and many more if you are
so inclined. There are also specialty lexicons covering
law, science and variety of other disciplines.
So now when my colleague at work tosses out some word
I don't understand, I just pretend I'm making a note in
my PDA while in fact actually finding out that he has actually
misused the word. Now what I need is an etiquette program
to help me figure out a way to tell him he's wrong! RoadLingua
is a well-designed reader which can be populated with a
huge range of useful and accurate lexicons. Highly recommended.
Letters to the Editor are welcome and occasionally abused in public. Send e-mail to: whine@kickstartnews.com
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