65% off Dragon Naturally Speaking

Just in case anyone doesn't see the big picture on the dictionary home page, Amazon have a 65%-off offer today on Dragon NaturallySpeaking dictation software. This would appear to be an excellent deal that I wanted to bring to the attention of users of the site, since they may be interested in language-related software. Unfortunately, this offer does appear to be only on the English version of the software (i.e. it can perform speech recognition and text-to-speech on English, but not other languages; other language versions of the software are available, but not with the offer at present). Still, it's well worth knowing about.

Note that a few negative reviews point to problems in the installation process rather than the quality of the actual software, which generally appears to get a high rating. Contrary to some of the comments, a free Vista 64-bit upgrade is now available from the Nuance web site.

French dictionary update

Today's update to the French dictionary improves on the entries to various common words and adds various new words and phrases in various scientific fields. This new vocabulary reflects various recent coinages such as:

• from sociology, mème and mémétique
• from the field of crime and security, the entry for passeport now includes passeport biométrique
• from the field of medicine, terms including myositis and anticholestérol
• from the field of business, brevetabilité and troll de brevets
• from the field of maths, various terms not necessarily newly coined but lacking from the dictionary, such as parallélipède and various types of triangle

Note that these are only a sample of the new terms added.

New French vocab and grammar content

The following new pages have been added to the site:

• a basic introduction to French adjectives, which shows the basic rules for forming regular French adjectives, and includes an on-line exercise; it also includes an exercise on a basic class of "semi-regular" adjectives ending in -n, which double the -n in the feminine (italien -> italienne)
  
• in the basic French vocabulary section, a list of musical instruments in French, with some accompanying notes about how to say things such as I play the piano.

Dictionary update

The latest update to the French dictionary includes:

• various geographical names that have recently occurred in news articles
• various frequently-occurring declined forms (e.g. feminine forms, conjugated forms of verbs) with token translations to help readers (note that in general, conjugated verb forms can all be looked up in the dictionary, and you will be told which verb the form is from, and which tense and person the form is)
• improvements to the entries of various common words.

Power outage 14 Feb

A severe data centre power failure caused this and other sites to be down for most of the morning (US) / afternoon (UK/Europe). Apologies for the outage, which was beyond mine and many people's control...!

Dictionary update

A few minor corrections and updates have also been made to the French dictionary.

New worksheets: crosswords

In the French Worksheet PDF section of the web site, some new French crossword PDFs have been added. These crosswords are designed as a vocabulary aid to learners of French, and so are actually English-style crosswords. The words in the crossword are items of French vocabulary, but the clues are the English translations of those words. Each PDF file contains a variety of crosswords on a given theme (generally, different sizes of crossword, with 4 different crosswords at each size).

Feedback on these crosswords and indeed any of the French worksheets/exercises available available on the site is always welcome.