You may already be very familiar with our dictionaries, but if you’re new to us or want to understand us better, we’d like to give you an overview. Wordsmyth currently has dictionaries at four levels, with three of the levels found in the Comprehensive Dictionary Suite at wordsmyth.net and the fourth level, Wordsmyth Illustrated Learner’s Dictionary (WILD), at kids.wordsmyth.net/wild.
Advanced Dictionary
The highest level of our dictionaries is called the “Advanced Dictionary.” The Advanced Dictionary is suited to the needs of adults and students from middle-school age and up. It currently contains 60,000 headwords, with example sentences for nearly 17,000 words, adding up to a total of nearly 50,000 examples. Like all of our dictionaries, the Advanced Dictionary has both text and audio pronunciations for all words, as well as thousands of photographs and artist-created illustrations.
It was for the Advanced Dictionary that the Wordsmyth team developed its integrated thesaurus, a source for synonyms, antonyms, and similar words. We call it an “integrated” thesaurus because thesaurus information is matched with individual senses (meanings) of words so that, for example, synonyms for the headword “hot” referring to temperature, “hot” referring to spiciness of food, and “hot” referring to popularity are matched with their appropriate definitions in the entry for “hot.” The synonyms appear directly under each pertinent definition in the dictionary entry. There is no need to click to go to a different page to access the thesaurus information.
Intermediate Dictionary
The next level down from the Advanced Dictionary is the “Intermediate Dictionary.” As in the Advanced Dictionary, thesaurus information is built in and matched with particular senses of words. The Intermediate Dictionary was written for children at the upper elementary level. The definitions are written with simpler vocabulary and sentence structure than those written for the Advanced Dictionary. The Intermediate Dictionary contains approximately 14,000 headwords and contains 23,000 full-sentence examples. Additionally, all the headwords for the Intermediate Dictionary, as well as all the example sentences for headwords, have been translated into Spanish and Chinese. (Note also that each sense of every headword is individually translated.) These translations are available to our subscribers and appear in the entries when the feature is selected by the user. (Spanish and Chinese headword translations also appear in the other Wordsmyth dictionaries for these same words.)
Beginner’s Dictionary
The “Beginner’s Dictionary” is a dictionary that is geared toward adult literacy and adult ESL. The Beginner’s Dictionary contains approximately 5000 headwords written in a concise but simple style. The dictionary contains over 8,000 example sentences.
A feature developed specifically for the Beginner’s Dictionary is the Word Builder. Word Builder displays words that are built on the headword that is looked up. For example, with the headword “cool,” we list the words “cooler” (a type of refrigerator) and “coolant” in the Word Builder along with a short definition of each of these additional words. While derivations of headwords (e.g., “coolly” and “coolness”) are listed for entries at all dictionary levels, the Word Builder, developed for the Beginner’s Dictionary, goes a step further, particularly in defining the additional words.
Comprehensive Dictionary Suite
The three dictionaries just described–Advanced, Intermediate, and Beginner’s–compose the Comprehensive Dictionary Suite. Within the suite, the user may easily move up or down between the levels to find simpler or more advanced definitions and example sentences for particular words.
Wordsmyth Illustrated Learner’s Dictionary (WILD)
WILD, our introductory level dictionary, is a resource for very young children (grades K-2). WILD is also geared toward the needs of young English Language Learners, although even adult learners may enjoy and benefit from its highly comprehensible definitions and example sentences. WILD is accessed at kids.wordsmyth.net/wild, or through our homepage at wordsmyth.net, or by going to the “Dictionaries” tab at the top left of any higher level dictionary page and then clicking on WILD in the drop-down menu.
WILD contains close to 4000 headwords, all written with simple, full-sentence definitions and kid-friendly example sentences. Text and audio pronunciations accompany all headwords. Words in WILD are richly and charmingly illustrated with artist-rendered illustrations as well as photographs. Moreover, there are animated illustrations for action verbs and many abstract concepts (e.g., “more,” “part,” “through,” “into”) that are fundamental to an understanding of the language in general as well as to comprehending the writing in the dictionary entries.
In addition to the “Book,” where all the standard dictionary information is found, WILD contains the visual environments called “World” and “Collections.” In World, children view objects labeled in city or nature settings, such as Home, School, the Forest, the Seashore, the Farm. In Collections, children view things and actions within categories. In Collections, one might view, for example, types of plants, people in their jobs, sea animals, birds, mammals, outdoor activities, places where people live, emotions, and maps of the world. In addition to Book, World, and Collections, WILD contains the Wordsmyth Picture Dictionary, which contains a subset of the WILD headwords. The words are defined here by picture only. Each word receives audio pronunciation and links to where the word can also be found in other parts of WILD.
We hope you enjoy all our Wordsmyth dictionaries! There is so much to explore!