Functionality, Features and Content

Currently, a user can:

Browse entries by first letter

Via links in the navigation bar, you can retrieve a list of all words beginning with that letter.

Search for a word

Type a word into the text box and press return or click the search button. There is also a toggle button (like a check box) to match case. SQL wild cards may be used at any position, e.g.

%one% will search for all words containing one, and c_t matches both cat and cot.

View a word’s definitions and part of speech

In the active accordion pane for each word, all available definitions are displayed. An abbreviation for the part of speech is displayed in the accordion header (adj., adv., n. or v.). If a word may be used as multiple parts of speech (e.g., run as both a noun and a verb), two entries will be made. Each Dubsar dictionary entry has a single part of speech.

View a word’s synonyms

All available synonyms for a word are listed with its definitions.

See suggestions for search terms in an autocompleter

The autocompleter shows available matches while a user is typing. It honors the match case selection, only suggesting case-sensitive matches when the button is selected.

Choose between two canned jQuery themes using a pair of radio buttons

The application uses a cookie to store the selected theme.

See flash-based error messages

The application redirects to the previous page (if internal) or the index with a reasonable error message in case of exception.

Scroll through search results without losing the page header or footer

A framelike fixed-position display allows a user to scroll the results.

See a “working…” message when a search request is submitted

A message is temporarily displayed below the header bar while waiting for the next page to load.

Read news about the site in the index view

A “News (n.)” accordion pane has been added.

Take a tour of the application

Dubsar now has a /tour path, accessible from the index view.

See a list of QUnit tests in a browser

Visit dubsar-dictionary.com/qunit

Get better visual notification when a search is in progress

A “working…” message is displayed any time a search request is made to the server for a new page. Whenever the AJAX autocompleter is active, the mouse cursor for the search box and autocompleter menu is changed to a wait cursor for the duration of the request.

Include extra white space in a request

The application strips all leading and trailing white space in a request and compresses multiple internal white space characters to a single space.

See most popular words at the top of the autocompleter

Now the autocompleter sorts words by hit count.

See inflected forms for words

Dubsar takes irregular inflected forms from WordNet® and computes regular inflections for nouns (using the ActiveSupport Inflector) and verbs (using morphological rules).

Search words by inflection

Any search that does not contain a wild card is referred to the inflections table. Wild card searches are referred to the words table.

See top autocompleter results only

The autocompleter now only shows the top ten matches by frequency count.

See the frequency count for each sense of a word

These are now visible by mousing over each sense in a definition pane.

See the lexical file associated with each synset

WordNet® associates a tag like <noun.food> or <verb.cognition> with every synset.

See metadata in a custom tooltip

Synset samples have been moved to a custom tooltip with the frequency counts and lexical file names.

See verb frames among tooltip metadata

Available verb frames are listed on the tooltip.

View lexical and semantic pointer data

These are now listed in the tooltip.

Follow links to tooltip pointers

The custom tooltip now anchors itself when the user stops moving the mouse for two seconds, giving you an opportunity to follow links on the tooltip.

See a list of frequently asked questions

There is now an FAQ accordion.

View adjective markers

Adjective markers (p), (a) and (ip) are now visible in the tooltip header for adjective senses that have them.

Share Dubsar on social networks

Dubsar now has a number of links to social networks, as well as a presence on Facebook.

Subscribe to an RSS feed

Dubsar now has an RSS feed for the contents of the news pane in the index view.

Recognize Dubsar as a search engine

Dubsar now supplies OpenSearch information via a meta tag and a /opensearch.xml feed, allowing Dubsar to be included in a list of a browser’s search engines. Autocompletion is also supported.

Easily view Dubsar on a mobile device

Dubsar now has a mobile interface, using jQuery Mobile, available via the /m route.

Get live suggestions from an autocompleter on a mobile device

The same autocompleter used on the main site is used to provide live suggestions as a user types.

View search results on a mobile device

A user is presented with a list of matching words as the result of each search.

View word definitions on a mobile device

A user is presented with a page listing the inflections and glosses for a word when they select that word from the list of search results.

View detailed information about a word sense on a mobile device

The same information that is available in the custom tooltips (lexical names, adjective markers, frequency counts, sample sentences, verb frames and pointers to related words), as well as a list of synonyms, is presented to the user in a separate page when they select an entry from the list of glosses for a word.

Use an HTML 5 search field

The main site now uses an HTML 5 input field of type search. Certain browsers (notably Safari and Chrome) style such fields differently to indicate that they are prompting for a search.

See the search term in the search field when viewing search results

The search term is now displayed in the search field when viewing search results. The exception is regular expression searches, such as are used for the alphabet links in the header bar. When the user clicks on one of those links, the search term (an ugly regular expression) is not displayed in the search field. Generally, the idea is to retain any text the user types in, to indicate more clearly which results they are viewing, and to facilitate editing the term (in case it’s misspelled, e.g.). The “match case” button also will reflect the search settings. If the results are for a case-sensitive search, the button will be selected when the view is rendered.

Browse words, senses and synsets directly

These things now all have their own views.

See better lexical/semantic linking of pointers

Previously, all pointer links (in tooltips) were simply search links. For example, one sense of the word evil, meaning “morally bad or wrong,” is antonymous to one sense of the word good, meaning “morally admirable.” Previously, the tooltip for that sense of evil would include a search link that would return all entries for the word good (three parts of speech and all their senses). Now the tooltip and the sense view include links to that individual sense, providing much more precise information. This applies to both the main and mobile sites, as well as the JSON service.

Use the OpenSearch protocol in the Dubsar autocompleter

The same autocompletion protocol used to provide suggestions to browsers using the OpenSearch plugins is now used in the autocompleter both on the main and mobile sites.

Use a Dubsar Mobile OpenSearch plugin

There is now a separate plugin (dubsar-dictionary.com/mobile-opensearch.xml) to allow Dubsar Mobile to be registered with a browser like Firefox 5 Mobile as a search engine.

Use an HTML 5 search input

The search input field is now an HTML 5 “search” type input tag. It also uses the HTML 5 autofocus attribute to load the page with focus in that field.

See the search field prepopulated when displaying results

When a search is returned, the search input is prepopulated with the previous search term. This is similar to the behavior of the mobile site (not to mention search engines like Google). It helps remind the user what they are looking at and facilitates quick editing of the term.

See a custom 404 pages

Dubsar is now returning 404 status codes for the first time. Even for a bogus URL like dubsar-dictionary.com/foo, Dubsar always redirected to the previous page or the index view with an error message in the flash. Now it only redirects for valid searches (including a term parameter) that return no results. In all other cases, it gives a 404 with a custom error page. This includes the mobile site.

See big mobile view improvements

In particular, the mobile sense views that lay at the bottom of the navigation hierarchy included lots of small links that were hard to use because of their size. These have been replaced with collapsible divs and large buttons. There are also now mobile synset views in version 1.2.

Use a share dialog

Dubsar previously had links to social networks that were removed out of concern for the privacy of visitors to the site as well as their adverse impact on page load times. This version introduces an AJAX-backed share dialog. When the jQuery UI dialog opens, Dubsar populates the dialog with the response to an AJAX request. This keeps all external markup and content out of the main Dubsar site until the share link is clicked. Only then are the social buttons loaded. Page loads are still fast, and visitors who are not interested in sharing the site need not notify Facebook or Google of their presence. Facebook Like buttons come in dark and light themes. Dubsar switches the theme of the Facebook Like button to match its own display theme as the theme picker is used.

Use a rudimentary JSON service

It is now possible to retrieve all the data required to build all the HTML views in Dubsar via JSON. In particular, the /search, /words, /senses and /synsets routes all return JSON responses when so requested. For example: dubsar-dictionary.com/words/1.json. cf. dubsar-dictionary.com/words/1. This work was required to support applications for Android and iOS.

View a word of the day

Dubsar now shows a word of the day on its home page.