Helen FieldsScience Writer

One of my favorite online dictionaries, Leo, is this week’s Dictionary of the Week. Actually, it’s kind of last week’s Dictionary of the Week. Hey. I was busy.

Yep, the online dictionary gets an unattractive picture of my computer screen. Sorry, Leo.

One of the many problems with having a job is that you don’t always have your dictionaries with you. In my last two office jobs, I usually had a red English dictionary, a medical dictionary, and a few usage guides at my desk. So if I had to look something up in a foreign language, I was stuck with the internet. (Yes, I could have visited the library, but this is the internet age, my friend.)

My general verdict on online dictionaries: I don’t like ‘em. Take Norwegian, for example. This one gives the impression that it exists solely as a vehicle for ads and this one doesn’t have the word “funky.” Actually, neither has the word “funky.”

Now look what happens when you type “funky” into Leo. Not only do you get five possible ways to say “funky” in German, you also get “to dance the funky chicken” (den Ententanz tanzen) (literally: to dance the duck dance). Then farther down on the page there’s a list of links to forums, with discussion topics like “Deutsche Übersetzung gesucht ‘Funky cold Medina’” (“looking for a German translation of ‘Funky Cold Medina’”).

One of my classmates told me about Leo when I was taking a brush-up German class at the Goethe-Institut Washington early last year. He worked for a German architecture firm, so he had a somewhat more urgent need to look up German words than I did. It’s only useful when you’re sitting at a computer, and I always did my homework for that class on the metro.

But when I went to Germany this fall to do a journalism fellowship, boy was I happy to have Leo. I always had it open on my computer – to help me read the morning paper, to translate words into German when I was writing, for looking up words I heard people say or whatever. My colleagues all used it, too. They were covering science, which meant they had to read a ton of journal articles and press releases and websites in English.

The main problem with Leo is that there are so many entries, sometimes you can’t figure out which is the most important. Take “finish.” It has several senses – the finish line, the finish on a piece of furniture; finishing a glass of water is different from finishing a project. When you look it up on Leo, they’re split up by part of speech, but other than that, they’re all listed in alphabetical order.

The advantage of a dictionary on paper: it prioritizes. But you can’t beat Leo for speed.

Dictionary Stats: LEO Deutsch-Englisches Wörterbuch

date: constantly updating
publisher: LEO GmbH
length: 586,592 entries
special feature: Advent calendar. Of German poetry. Enjoy.
other languages: Leo also has Deutsch-Französisch, Deutsch-Spanisch, Deutsch-Italienisch, and Deutsch-Chinesisch editions.
news: Leo has added a new set of economic terms. “We hope that definitions of terms such as Gläubigerausschuss or Steuerausweichung will prove valuable for many of our users – including native German speakers.”
obscenities: Wow. Yes. So many obscenities. In so many combinations and forms.