Colleen Ross, “Insights into the English Language” (CBC’s Word of Mouth, Jan. 7, 2013)
Other websites, including Vocabulary.com, offer audio pronunciations as well. Executive producer Ben Zimmer, who also presented at the convention, says the website used several opera singers to make the 140,000 sound files because they’re adept at interpreting the International Phonetic Alphabet. Consider it a grammatical serenade. […]
In the online world, you also lose the serendipity of discovering other words besides the one you looked up.
While Ben Zimmer acknowledges that, he says we’ll simply develop different orientations to text as we go online. He’s also the head of VisualThesaurus.com, which he says is modelled on how our brain works, and uses word maps.
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