Dictionaries on line

[Faith Wigzell]

A note to Michael. I am British and have no idea what that expression
means. I am near retirement age so it clearly is really archaic! I would
add that as students we had a game called 'know your dictionary', which
involved catching one's friends out with ridiculous vocabulary taken from
the dictionary, which included absurd English expressions that none of us
had ever heard of. (By the way, the game was a disaster for language
learning, as to this day I have a vocabulary of completely useless words.)
When I spent a year in the USSR in the early 60s and, I may say, on
subsequent visits, I was always falling out with Russians who would try out
allegedly English idioms on me to my bemusement or mirth. Blame the
dictionary.

Yours

Faith Wigzell
School of Slavonic and East European Studies,
University College London

>Dear SEELANGers:
>
>In response to Ms. Spivak's request for recommendations for on-line
>dictionaries, I'm reposting below an earlier answer which comes from an
>online guide I wrote for undergraduate students. (I apologize to my British
>colleagues for the "lamentable" comment, though I added it for my students'
>sake: I remember as an undergrad looking up "na svoix dvoix" in Mueller and
>finding "on Grey's mare" as the translation... It took searching in several
>English (American) dictionaries, in turn, to discover what that meant.)
>
>Several addenda:
>1. I've been translating technical documents lately, and have found that the
>Cyrill and Methodius site listed below has an excellent selection of
>computer-related terms, though it's significantly better from Russian to
>English than vice-versa.
>2. Another very useful web reference source is Paul Goldschmidt's Dictionary
>of Period Russian Names http://www.sca.org/heraldry/paul/index.html. It's
>basically a long list of Russian imena and familii that gives the
>etymological meaning and sometimes the initial history of a given family --
>very useful sometimes.
>
>****
>
>
>There have been a couple of questions recently about Russian online
>dictionaries. I put the following list & recommendations together for my
>students. There's a mix of Russian dictionaries, Russian-English, and
>English-Russian. Mr. Stratienko asked whether they were accurate --
>considering the generally lower standards for online publication, they've
>all struck me as fairly reliable.
>
>The Cyrill and Methodius site also has a really very good news service that
>offers some of the more interesting commentary around on Russian and world
>events. Check out also their reviews of museum exhibits in Russia.
>
>Dictionaries and References:
>
>Ozhegov's Dictionary of the Russian Language (???????? ??????? ????????
>?????): http://www.agama.ru/oz_demo.htm The standard Russian Russian
>Dictionary. 40,000 entries, with examples of correct use and some sayings.
>
>Mueller's English-Russian: http://www.falcon.ru/cgi-bin/wwwdic Not a bad
>dictionary, exhaustive, but lamentably British.
>
>Andrei Sabelfeld's English-Russian Dictionary:
>http://www.cs.chalmers.se/%7Eandrei/dictionary/index.cgi?English=file&Encodi
>ng=1251 About 77,000 entries. I've found it to be quite useful and accurate.
>
>The remarkable Babylon: http://babylon.nd.ru/ Search any or all of the
>following books: The Dictionary of World Wisdom, Area Codes, The Dictionary
>of Orthography, The Dictionary of Foreign Words, Brokhaus and Efron's
>Dictionary. The latter is really an encyclopedic dictionary, and probably
>the best reference book ever published in Russian.
>
>Another excellent reference site is Cyrill and Methodius (?????? ? ???????):
>http://mega.km.ru/ Particularly useful is the pop-up keyboard that allows
>you to type (albeit slowly) in Cyrillic regardless of whether you have the
>proper drivers installed. In addition to a fairly good encyclopedia, the
>site has a well-designed English-Russian/Russian-English dictionary.
>
>
>
>Michael A. Denner
>Russian Studies Department
>Campus Unit 8361
>Stetson University
>DeLand, FL 32720
>904.822.7265
>
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