Machine-readable dictionary
Encyclopedia
Machine-readable dictionary (MRD) is a dictionary
Dictionary
A dictionary is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known as a lexicon...

 stored as machine (computer) data instead of being printed on paper. It is an electronic dictionary and lexical database.

A machine-readable dictionary is a dictionary in an electronic form that can be loaded in a database and can be queried via application software. It may be a single language explanatory dictionary or a multi-language dictionary to support translations between two or more languages or a combination of both. Translation software between multiple languages usually apply bidirectional dictionaries. An MRD may be a dictionary with a proprietary structure that is queried by dedicated software (for example online via internet) or it can be a dictionary that has an open structure and is available for loading in computer databases and thus can be used via various software applications. Conventional dictionaries contain a lemma with various descriptions. A machine-readable dictionary may have additional capabilities and is therefore sometimes called a smart dictionary. An example of a smart dictionary is the Open Source Gellish English dictionary
Gellish English dictionary
The Gellish English Dictionary-Taxonomy is an example of an open-source “smart” electronic dictionary, which concepts are arranged in a subtype-supertype hierarchy, thus forming a taxonomy. The dictionary-taxonomy is a machine readable...

.

The term dictionary is also used to refer to an electronic vocabulary
Vocabulary
A person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge...

 or lexicon
Lexicon
In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...

 as used for example in spelling checkers. If dictionaries are arranged in a subtype-supertype hierarchy of concepts (or terms) then it is called a taxonomy
Taxonomy
Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...

. If it also contains other relations between the concepts, then it is called an ontology
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...

. Search engines may use either a vocabulary, a taxonomy or an ontology to optimise the search results. Specialised electronic dictionaries are morphological dictionaries
Morphological dictionary
In the field of computational linguistics, a morphological dictionary is a file that contains correspondences between surface form and lexical forms of words. Surface forms of words are those found in any text. The corresponding lexical form of a surface form is the lemma followed by grammatical...

 or syntactic dictionaries.

History

The first widely distributed MRDs were the Merriam-Webster Seventh Collegiate (W7) and the Merriam-Webster New Pocket Dictionary (MPD). Both were produced by a government-funded project at System Development Corporation
System Development Corporation
System Development Corporation , based in Santa Monica, California, was considered the world's first computer software company.SDC started in 1955 as the systems engineering group for the SAGE air defense ground system at the RAND Corporation...

 under the direction of John Olney. They were manually keyboarded as no typesetting tapes of either book were available. Originally each was distributed on multiple reels of magnetic tape as card images with each separate word of each definition on a separate punch card with numerous special codes indicating the details of its usage in the printed dictionary. Olney outlined a grand plan for the analysis of the definitions in the dictionary, but his project expired before the analysis could be carried out. Robert Amsler at the University of Texas at Austin resumed the analysis and completed a taxonomic description of the Pocket Dictionary under NSF funding, however his project expired before the taxonomic data could be distributed. Roy Byrd et al. at IBM Yorktown Heights resumed analysis of the Webster's Seventh Collegiate following Amsler's work. Finally, in the 1980s starting with initial support from Bellcore and later funded by NSF, ARDA, DARPA, DTO, and REFLEX, George Miller and Christiene Fellbaum at Princeton University completed the creation and wide distribution of a dictionary and its taxonomy in the WordNet
WordNet
WordNet is a lexical database for the English language. It groups English words into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets...

project, which today stands as the most widely distributed computational lexicology resource.
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