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

n Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 2:33 PM, WJhonson@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