Merriam-Webster Dictionary Research Articles

A patient's perspective on ovarian cancer as a chronic disease—Devaluing a survivor's challenge

Since being diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer, I often hear that my cancer is now considered a chronic disease. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word “chronic” as a disease marked by long duration. I certainly hope that my disease is, indeed, of long duration. The course of advanced ovarian cancer, however, is not naturally one of long duration. It is not, naturally, a chronic disease. A woman may survive advanced ovarian cancer for years. However, it is a survival won at a great price physically, emotionally and financially. In the end, she will probably die of her disease.

Tools for making impossible changes – experiences with a tool for transforming large Smalltalk programs

In a commercial system, performing large, invasive changes, such as changing an entire infrastructure layer, is often impossible because development on a system cannot be halted for any significant amount of time. Performing such changes require tools that can perform mass transformations on the source code. One approach is to use tools that can do global search and replace on the entire program structure. However, simple text-based tools are too simplistic for program text. To make accurate changes in a large program the tool must be based on parsing the program text. The paper describes the requirements for such a tool, the shortcomings of this approach, and describes one such tool for the Smalltalk language. This tool, the Refactoring Browser Rewrite Engine, is based on pattern matching of parse trees. The paper then presents three case studies in the successful application of this tool in commercial settings and discusses the shortcomings of such an approach.“impossible adj. - 1 b felt to be incapable of being done, attained, or fulfiled : insuperably difficult. - Merriam-Webster Dictionary”

Live the ADA Legacy—Annually

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word “legacy” as “something transmitted or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past.” This is a story, begun 85 years ago, about the foundation of careers within the profession of dietetics. It is about the legacy left to each new member of the American Dietetic Association and each consumer, patient, student, and allied health professional that professionals work with each day.

Merriam-Webster's dictionary of American writers

Merriam-Webster's dictionary of American writers

NXT Space for Visual Thinking

NXT Space for Visual Thinking

All Mines, Fellas, All Mines!

EVER SINCE I was knee high to a grasshopper I have used the word hosie in the sense of 'lay claim to, bespeak.' When I was a kid I hosied an especially rosy apple; as an adult I hosie to dry, rather than wash, the dishes. It is a warm, cozy word; I like to use it; it makes me feel good, like saying 'Let's go snucks on that,' when I mean 'Let's go shares on that.' With its use I renew my childhood, and glance back into that marvelous, symbolic world. One day, many years ago, I looked up hosie in the dictionary-to see whether the Merriam-Webster dictionary spelled it with an s or a z, and to learn its derivation-and it was not there. When Harold Wentworth brought out his good American Dialect Dictionary a dozen years ago, I said, 'It will surely be here.' But it was not, and to this day it is in no dictionary, dialect or otherwise, that I know anything about. Yet it is used daily by millions of American and English speakers. When I began to go into the subject of hosie a bit, to ask people whether or not they knew the word, I discovered from the way they reacted to my question how deep in our consciousness it and other childish words lie. The words children learn from one another, in distinction to those they learn from adults, constitute a kind of trade language, a secret, submerged, underground jargon which keeps parents and other adults at a distance, out of the know. It is a language kept secret from the adult world partly, too, by the adult's capacity to forget. It is an incantatory cant, in which sound and rhythm are very important. Here the All in free of hide-and-seek becomes the wonderful sounding Ollee-ollee-unchin-free! Games have names to conjure with, like ring-a-lievio, allicomgreenzie, slobberhannes. Here rhyme creates such fantasies