 There’s a lot more lurking online than you’d expect
Printed dictionaries are a pain to use. Our last hardbound Merriam-Webster was so coated with dust that we finally relegated it to a box somewhere. And don’t you remember all the admonitions you’d gotten in school? “Look it up in the dictionary!” If you were reading an exciting book, you’d instead do your best to tease out the definition from context; if you were slogging through a boring homework assignment, stopping to page through your Funk & Wagnalls would only make a long assignment longer. What does any of this have to do with an article about creative services? A lot, actually. Stay with us. Enter the digital dictionary. It takes many forms. The earliest one we recall was simply the list of words that accompanied a word-processing application; today, we don’t call that a “dictionary”; we merely call it a “spell-checker.” But it was a start. Then there were huge dictionaries you could buy (on disc!) and install on your computer. Next came dictionary websites such as Merriam-Webster.com and www.dictionary.com They’re still around. Some of the most useful digital dictionaries you’ll employ these days are ingeniously embedded within other things you ordinarily use, such as e-readers (double-tap a word and its definition appears) and mobile phones. That’s an astonishing amount of power at your fingertips. Now let’s put it all to work for that next creative assignment. Defining “creative” First of all, what kinds of creative challenges could be helped along with a digital dictionary? There are lots, but before we get to those, we would like to point out one usage that always makes us cringe. And that’s simply quoting a definition as part of the opening text of your written document. Such as “Webster’s defines ‘Fashion’ as ‘a prevailing custom, usage, or style,’ etc., etc.” That galls us almost as much as attempting to spell out the word phonetically, as if the reader needs help learning how to pronounce a word such as “fashion”. Honestly. It’s pretentious and insulting. Enough ranting. You can use your digital dictionary for good, for lots of good, for things like taglines, product and service names, slogans, jingle lyrics, and plain old-fashioned copywriting. Your dictionary as word generator Most people think of a dictionary as a source of definitions. That would overlook one if its more useful applications: word-list generator. The trick here is to look up any word that’s relevant to your search, and then scroll through the list of entries before and after it. You’d be amazed at how much inspiration you’ll find. Let’s say you’re working on a tagline for a company that’s involved in—oh what the heck, why not—fashion. Type “fashion” into your dictionary and look not at the definition, but at the other entries which appear around it. Hmmm! Check out all of the interesting and inspiring choices that appear; here’s just a few of the 39 entries we found:
Now, in your same app, while still in “fashion,” click the “Thesaurus” tab. Oooh! Here are just a few of the helpful words that appear:
We’re even getting phrases we could play off of, such as:
Are we done? Of course not. Click on over to one of our favorite sites, rhymezone.com, and enter “fashion”. You’ll get hits sorted by syllable-count, such as:
And those are just the rhymes! Look at the pull-down menu when you first go to search at Rhymezone, and you’ll see it includes intriguing choices such as:
Notice that we didn’t crack open one single definition during this entire exercise. Putting it to use We don’t mean to imply that any of the stuff we’ve bullet-listed above is a tagline. But if you can spin any of those phrases into something new which is highly reminiscent of a well-known turn of phrase, you may be well on your way to creating a new tagline that’s inherently catchy and memorable. A dictionary—of any kind—is a tool, one of many, at your disposal. The trick is to not assume that it simply has one use. Need help with that next tagline, product name, or slogan? Contact us. We’d love to help, using these techniques and many others.
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