Antidote 11 User Guide

User Guide / The Dictionaries / Dictionary of Definitions / Details

Details

The panel on the right-hand side of the window has three sections (Details, Difficulties and More), offering a variety of complementary information on the headword. The main categories are explained below.

Etymology

Most words are accompanied by etymological information. The language of origin, in orange, is a clickable link to the article on that language in the History guide. A time gauge indicates the century of the first known use of the word.

The example on the right shows that the word passport is likely a borrowing from Middle French passeport, meaning “document enabling its bearer to enter a port”. Click on the symbol for the complete history of the word.

Frequency index

A frequency index is shown for most words in the form of a point on a line going from 0 (rare) to 100 (frequent). This logarithmically calculated number shows the relative frequency of the word in a corpus of several billion words. A textual frequency rank (very frequent, fairly frequent, etc.) based on this index is shown under the line. Hovering the mouse over the frequency line will also display a tooltip ranking the word in terms of numbers of words of equal or higher frequency (e.g. Of the 500 most frequent words).

Inflected forms

Inflected forms of the headword are shown: singular and plural forms for nouns, comparative and superlative forms for adjectives and conjugated forms for verbs.

Phonetics and pronunciation

All forms are accompanied by their phonetic transcription, which can be displayed in two alphabets. By default, Antidote displays the transcription using respelling. If you prefer to see the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), choose the Show IPA option using the button in the top right of the entry. Click on a transcription for examples of each phoneme used. Click on the icon to the right of a transcription to see regional variants in pronunciation, when applicable.

The icon allows you to hear the pronunciation of the headword and all its possible inflections, as well as the words given as examples for the phonemes of the phonetic transcription when it is displayed. These elements can be pronounced with a Canadian voice or with a British voice.

  • The displayed phonetic transcription takes into account your national language variety, as defined in the User panel of your language settings. For the American English and Canadian English regions, Antidote displays the transcription of the word in North American English, and in British English for the both British English varieties.
  • Your national language variety determines the voice offered by default for the pronunciation. To modify it, click on the button to the right of the header, then select the desired voice in the English pronunciation option.
  • If the word or one of its forms is pronounced differently in Canada and in the UK (e.g., advertisement) and its phonetic transcription is displayed, Antidote automatically displays the transcription that corresponds to the chosen voice.
  • When installed, Antidote displays the pronunciation icon (). If necessary, you can hide it in the settings (Interface > Access control > Audio content).
  • Pronunciation requires a valid subscription.

Variants

When a word can be spelled in more than one way, the variants section shows the different spellings with their relative proportion as a percentage, calculated from a corpus of several billion words, as well as the country of use. When a variant does not appear in the corpus, it is labelled rare.

Difficulty

Some words are subject to a particular set of usage conventions, which come with their own potential difficulties. These can relate to their meanings, inflections, syntactic or grammatical requirements, etc. The entries for such words in the definitions dictionary include a section in the right-hand panel entitled Difficulty, where specific usage information can be found. The example opposite explains how the comparative and superlative forms of the adjective far may vary according to the intended meaning of the word.

Some sources of difficulty are the subject of a guide article: an orange link will lead there directly.