Abstract

About 1455 AD the printing press was invented; two hundred years later the English language underwent spelling control. In another hundred years, in 1755, Samuel Johnson produced one of the first English dictionaries. Thus it took three hundred years from the invention of the first mass reproduction technology associated with language to the provision of a useful reference for language: the dictionary. Today, perhaps the most comprehensive book of its type is the Oxford English Dictionary; it contains over 500,000 words and the third edition is due to be published in 2010. In 1951 not only was the American Name Society inaugurated, but Remington Rand introduced the world's first commercial computer: the UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer). The computer grew up and fell in love with the dictionary and now the OED and other dictionaries are available to any Internet user. Cousins of the dictionary sit on the millions of desktop computers, each of which has vastly more power than the UNIVAC. One cousin is a register of words, which drives the spellchecker, and another is the thesaurus. The words of our language are available; we know what they mean, where they came from, how to pronounce them, and how to replicate them in text without error. We also have a host of automated tools including grammatical and style advice, autocorrect, automatic typing from dictation, and suchlike. We may conclude that, although everything can be improved, it looks like the writer can be left to concentrate on the content. Well, almost. I ran the MS-Word 97 spellchecker on this text and it balked at Remington. It didn't recognize it. Remington, a name that conjures up images of computers, typewriters, small arms, and cowboy art, halts the spellchecker, although it has no difficulty with Microsoft. Remington, for which the search engine Google produced about 230,000 (hits) ... in 0.31 seconds.

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