If you’re missing my blogging these days, that’s because you’re reading the wrong blog. Between now and mid-December, I’m doing a ton of writing over on the Washington Revels Blog.

(Link pointed out by Wray Herbert on Facebook.)

Today’s word: crenulate. I wrote a blog post about a crochet coral reef for Smithsonian magazine’s website, in which I referred to the edge of some structures on the coral reef as “crenelated.” That’s what I thought I’d heard people say. It seemed reasonable. I had a rough definition for it in my head – you know, ruffly, or something.

So this morning when I was writing about the coral reef for my own blog, and I got to that word, I thought, I should really check this. The blog post for Smithsonian was read by at least two editors, but I have no safety net on my blog. I also know that I have a problem with double consonants. It’s my spelling blind spot. I’ve looked up “accommodate” so many times, I think I’ve finally learned it, but…I usually look it up anyway just in case. As I flipped through the dictionary, I predicted that the correct spelling of crenelated would be one N, two Ls.

Boy, was I wrong. Both crenelate and crenellate are acceptable spellings. But they’re acceptable spellings of the wrong word. “Crenelate” is a verb that means “to furnish with battlements or crenels, or with squared notches.” (Crenel: “any of the indentations or loopholes in the top of a battlement or wall; embrasure.”)(Embrasure: “An opening (in a wall or parapet) with the sides slanting outward to increase the angle of fire of a gun.”) The adjective form is crenelated. Coral comes in many shapes, but it does not generally have battlements, crenels, embrasures, or squared notches.

The word I wanted was the next entry in the dictionary: crenulate. It means “having tiny notches or scallops, as some leaves or shells.” And here’s the other wacky thing: it’s an adjective. So you can just say a piece of coral or a nudibranch is crenulate. The dictionary allows “crenulated,” too, but this obviously doesn’t make sense. It’s like saying an apple is “redded.”

Crenelate and crenulate do come from the same root, as does crenate, which means the same thing as crenulate. (They come from the Vulgar Latin crena, a notch or grove.)

I guess most people use online dictionaries to check this kind of thing, but I don’t like online English dictionaries. I don’t like the way they look. I appreciate the tiny visual and tactile break that I get when I stop and take the dictionary off the shelf. And, most importantly, if I’d looked up crenellated here, I wouldn’t have seen the next entry and realized that was the word I was going for.

Dictionary Stats: Webster’s New World Dictionary: Third College Edition

date: 1991
publisher: Simon & Schuster
length: 1574 pages
guide words on p. 469: euploid adj. with the complement of chromosomes being an exact multiple of the haploid number, as diploid, triploid, etc.: see HETEROPLOID; euxenite n. a lustrous, brown-black mineral containing columbium, titanium, yttrium, erbium, cerium, and uranium
introduction: Includes an essay on language by John Algeo, who writes, “Language is not a Platonic idea abiding in a realm of archetypal truths. Rather it is a system we infer from the sounds that come out of the mouths of speakers and the marks that come from the hands of writers.” That means this is the kind of dictionary that includes “crenulated,” rather than scolding you about “redded.”
obscenities: I actually used this dictionary last night to look up quite a rude word – I wasn’t sure of the technical definition. No, I will not tell you which one.

I checked the row of dictionaries next to me and got – well, mostly words for “siphon” in different languages (Siphon; hevert; siphon; サイフォン) and a tip on usage (siphon, not syphon). My main English dictionary didn’t mention the kind of pressure. But my second-choice English dictionary and my medical dictionary both said the liquid is moved by atmospheric pressure. How about that? The guy was right.

I don’t think of a dictionary as a place where you’d find science errors, but of course that thing is full of science, from aardvark to zymogen. Looking for mistakes in the OED could be a whole new hobby for scientists.

Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC has got everything. You can look up characters by counting the number of strokes in them. You can type out a Japanese word phonetically, with roman letters, or in Japanese, if you happen to know how to make your computer write in Japanese. You can look words up in the general Japanese-English dictionary, or one of many other dictionaries – including automotive, Japanese-Slovenian, and river & water systems.

I use this dictionary for reading e-mails from my Japanese choir. I’ve been singing for a few months with the Japanese Choral Society of Washington (oh hey, I’m in the picture that’s on the homepage right now). During rehearsal, I’m ok – I can mostly follow what’s being said. It helps that I do a lot of choral singing and have a good idea of the kinds of things that conductors say. But a lot of important information gets transmitted by e-mail. It is so handy to be able to just cut and paste the words I don’t know into the dictionary.

I got a whole string of e-mails today from the group. One, about a potluck after rehearsal next week,contained the lovely word 帰国. The first character means “return” and the second means “country,” so together it means “go back to your country” – part of the occasion for the potluck is that a choir member is going back to Japan. It’s pronounced “kikoku.”

If you cut and paste that into the dictionary, you get a whole list of definitions. The first one is the word you looked up. Then there’s also compound words it appears in, like 帰国セール, kikokuseiru (sale), to sell your belongings before returning to your country, or 帰国子女枠, kikokushijowaku, special consideration for students who have lived abroad. Each entry has the word, the pronunciation, definition, a recording of someone saying it, and a string of links. Here are the ones for 帰国:

[V][Ex][G][GI][S][A][W] [JW]

Each of those looks up 帰国 in a different database – V takes you to all the ways you can conjugate 帰国 as a verb (I didn’t know I knew the hortative, but apparently I do), Ex is a list of sentences using 帰国, G is google, GI is google images, S is an online Japanese-Japanese dictionary, A is a Japanese-English online dictionary (for Japanese people), W is Japanese Wikipedia, and JW is some kind of Japanese word database.

The WWWJDIC doesn’t have the most beautiful interface, but it sure does a lot of stuff. I’m pretty sure I’ve only discovered a tiny corner of it, but I am very grateful to it for helping me read my e-mails.

Oh wow, yeah, I just came across this, for example: an interface that lets you handwrite a kanji with the mouse while the computer guesses what you’re going for.

Dictionary Stats: Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC

date: predates the world wide web; constantly updating
publisher: Jim Breen seems to be the guy; Monash University in Australia hosts the dictionary (he’s retired from the Electronic Dictionary Research Group)
other languages: Japanese – German, French, Russian, Swedish, Hungarian, Dutch, Spanish, Slovenian
amusing entry from FAQ: “[Q] I can’t read the kana readings. Will you add romaji display as an option.
[A] No. Better to learn kana. It will only take a week or two.”
insight from FAQ: “Remember that it is really a Japanese-English dictionary, and you have to take your chances with English-Japanese.”
obscenities: Yup. I can only remember one rude word in Japanese (糞), but it’s in there.

P.S. I know, I know, the Dictionary of the Week is now more like the Dictionary of the Quarter. It took a little hiatus. I don’t know if it’s back for good now or just dropping in.

The stickers say “Allowed to use on the exam!” and “Help with problem words” and “Mini-grammar.” Perhaps you can tell – this Norwegian dictionary is intended for use by Norwegians. I bought it in the university bookstore at the University of Oslo a few weeks after I graduated from college. I believe it was even shrink-wrapped, so I couldn’t look inside, but I needed a Norwegian dictionary, and Norway is a good place to buy them. It was 198 kroner, which is in the $30-$35 range.

I went to college in Minnesota, so when I found out I was going to Norway on a Fulbright, it wasn’t that hard to find a Norwegian class. The other college in town has a Scandinavian languages department, and a professor agreed to let me audit her intro class. It was pretty easy – I’d heard that Norwegian was what you took there if you needed to get the language requirement but couldn’t hack Spanish, and that seemed to be true.

My language education continued that summer at the University of Oslo’s lovely International Summer School. Many of the classes are international relations-y type topics and are taught in English, but you can also take Norwegian language and literature classes. By the end of my six-week intensive course, I could hold my own in a very, very simple conversation with a patient person, like the author of our textbook, who did the oral portion of our exam. (It’s a small country.)

Of course, then I went to Trondheim, where people speak nothing that resembles the standard Norwegian I’d learned in classes. And, just to make it harder, I was working in an academic environment with people who’d come from all over the country and brought their dialects with them. I mostly spoke English at work.

But I continued taking language classes, and with the help of my choir friends, I got pretty good at it by the end of the year. Choir friend Ann-Kristin, who I often saw at the bus stop on the way to work, refused on principle to speak English with foreigners. She was right, of course, and I appreciated her patience and her relatively easy dialect. (When I wasn’t around, she secretly spoke English with a visiting researcher from Spain; short-time visitors got a pass.) Another choir friend, Veronica, spent her summers guiding busloads of British tourists around her home islands, but eventually decided my Norwegian was good enough and switched. I never switched with another friend, Anna Bergitte – she’d lived in the U.S. in high school and spoke perfect idiomatic American.

The vast majority of Norwegians still speak much better English than I will ever speak Norwegian, but I’m still glad I learned it. I mean, obviously. I know how to pronounce æ, ø, å, and kj. I was able to read the Norwegian subtitles when I watched Scottish movies. And I’ve found it’s very useful with the older folks I’ve met through Norwegian folk dancing. (A hobby that came along much later.)

Fascinating fact I’ve just discovered while poking through the dictionary’s introduction: It was based on an English-Danish/Danish-English dictionary that came out in 1991.  Norwegian and Danish are really, really close, particularly in written form. I can read Danish, but I have no hope of understanding it when it’s spoken.

Dictionary Stats: Lingua Engelsk-norsk norsk-engelsk Ordbok for videregående skole

date: 1996
publisher: Universitetsforlaget AS
length: 831 pages
guide words on p. 714: skjold et shield; (våpen~) coat of arms; (flekk) blotch; skredder en tailor; (dame~) dressmaker.
introduction: Includes a history of English-Danish dictionaries. The first one came out in 1678 and had a title along the lines of “English Dictionary of which can be learned the English Speech, containing the Words which do not have a known affinity with Latin or Danish.” The first Danish-English dictionary appeared in 1779. These were both actually written by Norwegians, the introduction proudly points out.
useful extras: As with so many foreign language dictionaries, the extras – a guide to English grammar, tips on writing letters in English, a box listing the ways to translate fabrikk into English – would be much more useful if I were coming at the dictionary from the other side of the English/Foreign Language divide.
obscenities: Yup! I guess upper secondary students in Norway can handle rude words.

A school district in southern California has pulled all copies of Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed., from schools because it defines “oral sex.” (Oh god, what kind of google traffic is that going to bring to my blog?) A parent complained that their elementary-school kid had stumbled across that entry. It sounds from the newspaper story like this dictionary was only in fourth-grade classrooms and up, for the use of advanced readers.

First: “Stumbled across”? Yeah, right. Next: Let’s consult my dictionary collection. I hadn’t thought to look for this particular term in my dictionaries before, ’cause it’s not really a bad word. So I just checked the two English dictionaries on the shelf next to me, and neither includes it, but they both have synonyms.

Here’s the story from the local paper, the Press-Enterprise. In another story, a school district spokeswoman says school officials are going to be reviewing the dictionaries by looking for other objectionable terms, which is kind of a funny mental image.

When you’re looking Japanese words up in dictionaries, you really need “ga” to come right after “ka” and “do” right after “to.” You know, the natural order of things. What? This order is not intuitive to you? Well, let me explain.

The sounds in Japanese are syllables made up of a consonant (usually) and a vowel. Within each set of syllables, the order is a i u e o (“ah ee oo eh oh”), and then each set starts with a different consonant sound. The sets are ordered a, ka, sa, ta, na, ha, ma, ya, ra, and wa.

But then some of those consonant sounds can be altered. So か makes the sound ka, but if you put two little marks on it, it makes が, which is ga. Same for き ki and ぎ gi, こ ko and ご go, etc. If you put the little marks on the た ta-characters, they become the だ da-characters. The さ sa family becomes ざ za, and the  は ha family has two alterations – the little marks make ば ba, and a little circle makes ぱ pa.

A lot of those are pairs of related sounds, which I didn’t realize until I studied Japanese and noticed that I couldn’t always hear the difference between k and g. If you don’t know which you heard, it’s much easier to look up both “kakkou” and “gakkou” if they’re right next to each other than if one of them is in the G’s and one is in the K’s.

So, once you have the alphabetical order down, you can use this dictionary. Of course, most Japanese words are actually written in Chinese characters, but you look them up in the dictionary by sound. The Chinese characters are given first in the entry, like this, for “tenshuu”: “てんしゅ 天主 the Lord.” You need the characters to distinguish it from “てんしゅ 店主a shopkeeper.” (One is the master of heaven; the other is the master of a store.)

This dictionary is a lot less useful for going from English to Japanese. Say you look up the word “dictionary.” Here’s what it will tell you: 辞典. Good luck figuring out how to pronounce that. Better to wing it: “You know, the book? And it has words? Many words? Japanese, and English, too? Both?” Sometimes I would look a word up, then show the entry to the person I was trying to talk to, but this only works if they have their reading glasses on them.

As with so many of my dictionaries, I have no idea where this one came from. I suspect a used book store or a friend…it was published in 1990, and I think it was probably well-loved before I got it. Oh, hey – it has the price “6.75″ written on the inside front cover, which means I got it at a used bookstore in the U.S. on one of my trips back for grad school interviews. Nice.

This dictionary’s service didn’t end when I left Japan. I’d relied on it for so long, and I wasn’t ready to let go of my Japanese life yet. I carried it in my bag for months after I moved back to the U.S. in 2000.

So one day that fall I was sitting with a new grad school friend in front of the campus bookstore at Stanford. Some guy came by and gave us t-shirts advertising bigwords.com, a textbook seller that apparently still exists – wow, what are the chances? Anyway, the t-shirts all had big words on them. Mine said “coruscant.” Neither of us knew what that meant, but I pulled out my Japanese dictionary, and it came through! It defined “coruscate” as ピカッと光る, which is a totally cute definition. The Webster’s on my shelf gives the accurate but boring “to give off flashes of light; glitter; sparkle.” Sanseido’s definition translates as “light up, like, ‘peekah’!”

Japanese is adorable – onomatopeia for everything. More on that later.

Dictionary Stats: Sanseido’s Daily Concise English Dictionary

date: 1990
publisher: Sanseido
editor: 宮内秀雄 (I’m not going to put money on it, but I think his name is Miyanaka Hideo or, in Western order, Hideo Miyanaka)
length: 1264 tissue-thin pages
guide words on p. 381: でんきうなぎ 電気鰻 an electric eel. てんじゅ 天授の sacred; gifted by nature.
up-to-date-ness: The map of Europe on the inside front has one Germany (thumbs up) but also one Yugoslavia (uh-oh) and one Soviet Union (oh dear).
useful extras: Many appendices for the Japanese person who wants to excel in English, such as translations of the names of Japan’s government agencies (原子力安全 Nuclear Safety Bureau), metric conversion tables, instructions for writing letters in English, and a chart converting Japanese dates to regular dates. (Showa 1 was 1926 and so on.) Gosh, I’d forgotten about that. I used to know what year it was in Heisei.
obscenities: Yup! And they do not hold back. The really rude ones are in here.

This book sounds promising. But it turns out to be…kind of lame. It’s just a bunch of black-and-white pictures with the stuff in them labeled. For example:

I’m just not sure how it improves my life to know that the little thingy that holds the parts of a stapler together is called a “hinge pin.” And if there is anyone in the world who needs to know the names of the various bits of a paperclip, I bet they already know them.

On the inside front cover flap, the book says it’s trying to keep you from having to fall back on “such multisyllabic catchalls as ‘whatchamacallit,’ ‘thingamajig,’ and ‘whoosiwhatsis.’” But those words are really very useful. If I said to you “The actuating lever knob broke off my pencil sharpener,” you wouldn’t have any idea what I was talking about. For one thing, who still owns a desk-mounted pencil sharpener? And also, words are only useful if both participants in the conversation know them. I’d be displaying much better communication skills if I called it “the little knob thingy on the end of the, like, lever thing you use to get it to attach to the table.”

Have you ever heard anyone call the middle of the tomato a “placenta”? Yeah, neither have I.

Also, it’s cut off here, but one of the lines pointing at the lettuce says “leaf.” Ohmygosh! That’s what that thing is called? Why didn’t anyone tell me?!?

The entries don’t explain what anything is for, either – just the names. My dad’s ruling on this dictionary, with which I agree: “Useless.” It seems like it should be kind of fun, even if it’s not useful, but it’s mostly just kind of perplexing. (The Amazon reviewers disagree with me, so maybe you should buy one of the used copies and see for yourself.)

Bonus: The book has a page titled, I kid you not, “Cowboy and Indian.” There’s a paragraph of text on Indians with such useful facts as “Many decorated their faces with war paint prior to battle.” Then the entire native population of North America is visually defined by this inset at the bottom of the page:

Dictionary Stats: What’s What: A Visual Glossary of the Physical World

date: 1981
publisher: Hammond
length: 565 pages
guide words on pp. 192-193: Jacket and Pants (including “padded shoulder”and “elasticized waist”); Blouse and Skirt (including “turn-back cuff” and “dirndl skirt”)

1. I defy you to type “Langenscheidt” without messing up and typing “edit” instead of “eidt” at the end. I have to backspace and fix it every time.

2. I got all excited when I went to Munich and saw the big Langenscheidt “L” on an office building. Ok, that’s more about me than about Langenscheidt. I’m a nerd.

3. They also publish lots of maps, including the ADC street maps of the Washington area, which have been getting me places since 1985. Thanks, Langenscheidt!