Minh Nguyen mxn@zoomtown.com wrote:
Useful for checking if a word exists (i.e. spell check).
But spell check presents suggestions for correcting your spelling.
Advanced spell check does, certainly. Not the kind you'd find in simple applications, where 'spell check' just highlights the words not in the dictionary--my IM client has this kind of spell check. And the more advanced, the better the suggestions--primitive will go by degree-of-difference, more advanced will check transpositions and nearby letter keys, better will compare against the sounds the letters are trying to represent, and common misspellings. Just because it's not top-of-the-line doesn't mean it's nonexistent.
You'd need some serious AI to *write* original definitions for tens of thousands of words, and I'm not confident that a community of 500-some can pull off such a huge feat without some outside help (a free-content dictionary, for instance).
It'd be silly to expect a bot to compose the entries. But as you say, there's nothing to prevent the information from being imported, if free ones can be found. If they can bot enough to create so many blank templates, they can bot enough to fill them in.
*Muke!