Abstract
The design of internet dictionaries roughly falls into two categories: built from the ground up and converted from print. Whereas the former often shows little influence from the hands of the lexicographer the latter proves that printed and electronic publishing require very different design solutions. Unfortunately, this has not yet been brought to the attention of the publishers. The article will try to explain this on the basis of a critical examination of two internet dictionaries, neither of which are overly convincing in their approach.
Highlights
The design of internet dictionaries roughly falls into two categories: built from the ground up and converted from print
An internet dictionary is a work in its own right
Designing an internet dictionary is wrought with the same amount of problems as designing a printed dictionary
Summary
Show only a limited amount of results 5 to 10 per page depending on the overall size of the dictionary’s articles This reduces clutter and lets the user know that he should refine his search. Reduce the number of Sometimes users test a dictionary by searching for all results words containing an “e” or similar. Relevancy in the case of advanced searches could be to display all articles that contain all search parameters, for instance lemma and collocation, up front and those only containing the lemma further down followed by those only containing the collocation This is just a sketchy suggestion, and alphabetical sorting is very often necessary but letting a user do multiple searches within a large first result is a much better tool for finding the solution to their current problem. Each article is ordered in a table for greater accuracy and control and can contain any or all of the following components formatted as follows: Lemma
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