[WikiEN-l] "I should know this, I worked on the Wikipedia article..."

[Carcharoth]

n Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 2:33 PM, <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:

<snip>

> I was just thinking the other day, "Is there a British-American Dictionary"
> ?  That would be a dictionary that has all these various words and phrases
> and their translations into British English.  Often I'll come upon an
> article obviously written by a Brit and it will say something like "At the market,
> her trolley bumped into a right blinker and he copped her one..."

I was hoping Wiktionary had something, but haven't found it yet.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Main_Page

The main page says:

"Designed as the lexical companion to Wikipedia, the encyclopaedia
project, Wiktionary has grown beyond a standard dictionary and now
includes a thesaurus, a rhyme guide, phrase books, language statistics
and extensive appendices. We aim to include not only the definition of
a word, but also enough information to really understand it. Thus
etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and
translations are included."

I'd assume that would include phrase books for US and British English
(and the other English variants as well).

I like the way Wiktionary approach policies!

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Wiktionary_policies

I'm impressed they are tackling sign languages:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_sign_languages

A bit on spelling variants here:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Spelling_variants_in_entry_names

For phrases, see here:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Phrasebook

But no US or British phrases.

I think you are stuck with looking up individual phrases and seeing
which country they originate from. Getting translations from one
variant of English into another doesn't seem to be something
Wiktionary has attempted yet.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Americanism
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/American_English
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/British_English
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Scottish_English
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Commonwealth_English

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Dialects

Carcharoth