How To Handle Information Age's New Lexicon

By: Charles Bowen The Information Age has made our language much more complex. Completely apart from buzzwords and the verbal fast-food jargon that clogs our communications channels, thousands of legitimate technical terms enter our collective lexicon every year.

To cover highly specialized fields, from science and medicine to law and education, we need to be able to speak the language. And more and more, printed dictionaries and encyclopedias just can't keep up with the explosion of new terms coming at us. No one is saying we should replace our paper friends with digital dictionaries, but the time has come to let the Internet bring in some reenforcements.

A new Web site from Australia promises to be the online clearinghouse for technical language of all kinds. The Glossarist is a comprehensive directory of more than 9,000 glossaries, 3,200 of which have been cataloged into 130 categories and subcategories. You can search by keyword or browse for a glossary by topic and sub-category.

To get started with the resource, visit the site at http://www.glossarist.com, where the introductory page is topped with a data entry box. Here you can search for links to a specific type of glossary. Just enter a word or phrase, check or uncheck the "Match All Words" box below the data entry field and click the Search button.

Alternatively, you also can browse for glossaries, choosing one of the linked categories listed below the search box in the lower left section of the introductory screen. Nearly two dozen topics are listed, including arts and culture, business, careers and employment, computers and Internet, economy and finance, education, family and relations, entertainment, government, politics and military, health, medicine and fitness, humanities and social sciences, law and justice, media, lifestyles, news and weather, reference, science, sports and recreation, technology, transport and world, regions, countries and travel.

Each category is further subdivided. The Arts and Culture section, for instance, has sub-links to dance, music and theater, but also augments its links to general glossaries with those for animation, cartoons, architecture, and fine arts. Whether reached by searching or browsing, the glossaries links usually include brief descriptions.

To maintain The Glossarist, Webmaster Warwick Bone of Rozelle, Australia, uses a software spider that roams the Internet looking for glossaries. "When found," Bone says in an online statement, "these are all included in the searchable database. I eyeball every glossary before it is included in the directory, and try to place it in as many appropriate categories as necessary."

On a monthly basis, the glossary database is "re-spidered, checked and updated," Bone adds. "This way, I try to keep dead links to a minimum."

Meanwhile, here are some other glossary- and dictionary-related Web sites you might want to visit and save in your "Favorites" among your online tools:

1. Babylon.com (http://www.babylon.com/gloss) provides one-click access to instant definitions and translations of technical terms. The site gives you access to hundreds of specialized glossaries, submitted by businesses and individuals all around the world. Also of interest is its conversions of currencies, metrics, and time zones.

2. For sports terms, check out the Sports Glossaries Online Reference Guide (http://www.firstbasesports.com/glossaries), which has searchable databases of sports terms for the biggies like basketball, hockey, soccer, and football. It even translates hand signals used by referees (http://www.firstbasesports.com/handsig/hshome.htm).

3. And for a different approach to computer-oriented technical terms, look at The Animated Techtionary, a technical dictionary with animated illustrations on the screen (http://www.crosstouch.com/techtionary/index_in.html). Select a term like "asynchronous data transfer" and up comes an animated graphic to explain the function of start bits, stop bits, and error checking.

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