Title: Farlex Free Dictionary
Publisher: Farlex, Inc.
URL: http://www.thefreedictionary.com
Cost: Free
Tested: March 15-20, 2005

Farlex's interface is a bit overcrowded, but its software can bring out the best of the excellent WordNet lexical reference system — better than the native application. It also uses excellent examples (mostly from classical literary works) to illustrate the use of the words in context. This feature alone (which is typically more enlightening and convincing than the sample sentences made up by editors in some dictionaries) makes visiting this site worthwhile. Just be sure to include the definite article in the URL as freedictionary.com is a different site that doesn't have online dictionaries, let alone free ones.

The Context

There are many good, and even some excellent, free dictionaries on the Web, such as Longman's Contemporary English, Penguin's Concise and Oxford's Compact. Some publishers offer more than one free dictionary: Oxford University Press also makes available its Advanced Learner dictionary and Cambridge University Press has four free dictionaries. In some cases, the largest unabridged version of a dictionary is freely accessible, such as the one from Random House and the American Heritage Dictionary 4th edition (AHD4).

Not all of them are the online counterparts of the most current print editions. Merriam-Webster offers the 10th edition of its Collegiate Dictionary free online, reserving the 11th edition for subscribers. Similarly, Chambers has an online version of an earlier edition of its 21st Century Dictionary, probably to avoid cannibalizing sales of the most recent print edition.

In addition to these general dictionaries, there are many free and contemporary dictionaries in several disciplines, such as the Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary and Nolo Press' Law Dictionary. The superb OneLook service allows you to search across hundreds of free general and subject dictionaries (and some encyclopedias, too).

To a more limited extent, the concise versions of some general and special encyclopedias are also freely available, such as those of Britannica, Encarta and Hutchinson. There are also some unabridged encyclopedias, like the Canadian Encyclopedia (along with its Junior edition), the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada and the splendid A.D.A.M. encyclopedia, which is licensed by the vast majority of substantial medical sites. The value of Farlex' s service should be judged in this context.

The Content

In spite of its name and Web address, this resource is more than a free dictionary aggregated from other dictionaries. Unfortunately, Farlex is not forthcoming with its sources, even though it has a page about them or, to be more precise, about some of them. Even more oddly, while it profusely credits each entry taken from Wikipedia and credits entries from AHD4, credit for Columbia and Hutchinson are at the bottom of the screen or follow the entry. Additionally, Farlex never credits entries from Princeton University's WordNet, the medical dictionaries of the National Institute of Health or Bouvier's Law Dictionary. Nor does the site mention the latter two in its list of sources. Even though these sources are in the public domain, giving credit to them would make Farlex look more professional.

Farlex also includes full entries from the Columbia Encyclopedia, from the more than 100-year-old 9th edition of Britannica, from Wikipedia, and short entries from the Hutchinson Encyclopedia.

As for the dictionaries, beyond the recently licensed American Heritage Dictionary 4th edition (AHD4), Farlex also has entries from the WordNet 2.0 dictionary developed by the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University. These two dictionaries complement each other very well. And, although AHD4 is a very good dictionary, there are several words in my benchmark suite for which AHD has no definition but WordNet does, such as cheesed-off, chill out, kerfuffle and street arab. For some other words, the entry from WordNet includes an additional meaning of the word or the appropriate meaning of an expression, such as for anthrax, which is more detailed and informative than the entry in AHD4.

There were hardly any matching entries in the medical dictionary component of Farlex for the medical subset of my benchmark mix. It was puzzling, especially without any credit at the bottom of the entries or in the source page of Farlex as to what was going on. After some digging, I found out why there were only minimal matches. The medical dictionary component in Farlex seems to be limited to the set of dictionaries from the National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Diseases — an important but rather limited domain of diseases and conditions. Its three dictionaries are widely used by medical Web sites and they have rather succinct definitions, but their illustrations are what are worth a thousand words. For example, look at the entries about villi and volvulus. Farlex also includes the illustrations, but occasionally this leads to truncated text, as is the case with volvulus.

There is no information about the legal dictionary component, let alone credit given following the definitions that are displayed, but it was easy to identify by the extremely archaic language that, by comparison, makes the language of contemporary legal documents and dictionaries a pleasant read. I am a lawyer by my primary education and while I appreciate Bouvier's Law Dictionary as a historic source from the 19th century, it is inappropriate for most Web users. Its coverage and language are archaic and irrelevant for the typical user who would like to know more about the legal terms that lawyers throw around. There are far better free law dictionaries available.

Take, for example, the definition of the word "accomplice" in Farlex's legal dictionary (i.e. Bouvier's Law Dictionary) and compare it to the one from the Real Life Dictionary of Law or Nolo's Glossary of Law. All the other legal terms in my benchmark mix produced similarly discombobulating definitions from Farlex's legal dictionary component, such as "adultery", or had no definition from the legal dictionary as the term was not used in the 19th century, e.g. "Miranda warning."

The Computer Dictionary component of Farlex is FOLDOC, (Free OnLine Dictionary of Computing). It is not as comprehensive as Webopedia and does not have as many informative illustrations, but is a useful complement to the other dictionaries by providing sumptuous definitions and explanations for computer science and technology-related terms, such as "cache" . The only term in my benchmark mix that surprisingly did not have a definition was "blog." FOLDOC is one of those Farlex resources that is not mentioned in the sources page, but is given appropriate credit for every entry displayed. As for the encyclopedias, I have written about them in my earlier reviews, so I will not elaborate on them here.

Farlex's best content is the set of sample sentences that illustrates the use of a term in literary texts. Most of the examples are from classical literary works that are now in the public domain. For example, the entry about bully has citations from Aesop, Walter Scott and Thackeray. The first one is a refreshingly cynical aphorism that is as much true today as it was more than 2,500 years ago. Sometimes a single author's work is used for all the sample sentences, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for the term "street Arab".

What makes these examples so much better than the traditional example sentences is that with the click of a button you can see from which work it was cited and get the surrounding sentences for broader context. Of course, you will not find sample sentences for neologisms, such as smog, or for the new meaning of an old term, such as hacker. In some cases irrelevant sentences may show up, as happened for the legal term "fair use", which is understandable and unavoidable.

The Software

The interface is not too inviting. It may remind you of link-farms that masquerade as search engines by planting your search term into boilerplate come-on lines, producing inane ads like "Buy jacso at half price" or "Shop for meningitis." This may also happen with decent search engines, but they usually better delineate the sponsored links from the possibly useful ones. On closer inspection, however, some of the nicer features of Farlex's software come through, such as offering the correct or alternately spelled version of your query term.

Then again, in cases of multiple word queries, the software may falter. When I looked for one of my medical test words, abductor hallucis, it claimed that the word was not found and offered — among others — musculus abductor hallucis. It was just the ticket and should have been matched for the original query offered.

It also may not be immediately obvious to users when a search term yields zero results as the message does not always stand out. On the other hand, it is convenient that the software informs you as to which components have a definition. The exception is the Hutchinson link that often indicates that the article is available for subscribers only after you were lured to that component from the system message. This was particularly irritating when I would then find the definition in the free version of the Concise Edition of Hutchinson.

The best feature of the software is the re-arranged, re-structured and visually appealing presentation of the content-rich entries of the WordNet lexical system, which may require one or two more clicks to display the same content.

Although Farlex is a mixed bag, by adding a contemporary legal dictionary and a far more comprehensive medical dictionary, it could become a much more useful source. Extending its smart idea of showing literary examples via sample sentences with contextual passages from high-quality free sources can make this happen faster. Giving credit where credit is due can also help.