As you may or may not know, these days, I spend much of my time in Word weeding away extraneous words, brushing up on cross-cultural idioms and decluttering clauses, in short editing.
The Senior Editor of the independent publisher I perform manuscript assessments and editing for mentioned a piece of software called 'WordGenius'. Well, yesterday, I finally got around to downloading a trial and thus far I'm very impressed!
It allows you to drop and drag words from any desktop application. It has good 'headword' and idiom information and, better still, is based on the Macquarie Dictionary, which is considered by most people to be the Australian standard.
Don't get me wrong. I still love my OED (Oxford English Dictionary), especially since I have it on CD as well as in its glossy, 20-volume glory, but with this versatility, I can more easily perform my double checks.
I also currently have a subscription to Macquarie Dictionary Online, which is great too, but the drag and drop facility of WordGenius saves me from having to cut and paste or input words manually. More importantly, if my internet connection happens to go down (perish the thought), I'll still be able to use WordGenius and my OED software without interruption.
The only problem I've encountered so far is the pronunciation add-on doesn't seem to function. That could be because I'm using a demo version and that functionality is disabled, or it could be related to the fact that my computer system is rather overdue for an overhaul.
In any case, I'll keep you posted on any (other) quirks I encounter and what my final review is.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment