Proximity search on a dictionary

EDUARDO JIMENEZ

Hello brothers:

When I prioritize MW English-Spanish, I got, for example, "whisper", when I doble-click "whispered". The same with MW Collegiate which is usefull to me when searching a meaning of a verb clicking on a verbal form.

I expected to get similar results using Concise Oxfors English Dictionary (I want to try this instead, I'm tired to get in MW "Middle English, from Old English..." in all its entries) but it performs exact searching. I think all dictionaries should perform proximity searching. How to control this? It's possible?

Rich DeRuiter

ROGER JIMENEZ said:

Hello brothers:

When I prioritize MW English-Spanish, I got, for example, "whisper", when I doble-click "whispered". The same with MW Collegiate which is usefull to me when searching a meaning of a verb clicking on a verbal form.

I expected to get similar results using Concise Oxfors English Dictionary (I want to try this instead, I'm tired to get in MW "Middle English, from Old English..." in all its entries) but it performs exact searching. I think all dictionaries should perform proximity searching. How to control this? It's possible?

My understanding is that the searching that's going on is for headwords. These are specified in/by the metadata that accompanies the dictionaries. I've found that sometimes a form is found in MW but not in COED, and other times vice versa. These particular issues involved are 'under the hood' and depend on the structure of the dictionary entries themselves.

I think by proximity searching you mean 'fuzzy search' or 'match all word forms' search, right? A proximity search is a search within a limited scope or section of text. What you want is something that is close to the word you're searching for, if an exact match doesn't exist. Logos5 doesn't use 'fuzzy search' anymore (Libronix had this), but it does have 'Match all word forms' in the search tool. It sounds like you want 'Match all word forms' for a right-click menu search of a word in a text you're reading in Logos (right?).