I haven’t fully grasped why Apple has yet to create a dictionary for iOS. It’s the perfect medium, and it would certainly help people a lot of people on a daily basis, especially those YouTube commentators we keep hearing about.
Apple may not be doing it, but that doesn’t mean a third party can’t take a stab at solving the problem. Fizzy Potion and Leonel Martins have teamed up to release Blends, a “Word Browser” based on Princeton University’s WordNet project. The result? 147,000 word definitions. The application also saves bookmarks so you can more easily refer to definitions in the future. Blends is only a couple of bucks, so it’s worth the investment.
You’re probably wondering what WordNet is, and how it integrates with Blends:
WordNet superficially resembles a thesaurus, in that it groups words together based on their meanings. However, there are some important distinctions. First, WordNet interlinks not just word forms—strings of letters—but specific senses of words. As a result, words that are found in close proximity to one another in the network are semantically disambiguated. Second, WordNet labels the semantic relations among words, whereas the groupings of words in a thesaurus does not follow any explicit pattern other than meaning similarity.
If you’re looking for more information on the WordNet project you can check it out on their website
