c4countdown

Doubt it will affect the game much, but if you search for a word in Lexico, you might see this text pop up:

“We will be closing the Lexico.com website and redirecting it to Dictionary.com starting Aug 26, 2022.”

Dictionary.com is in partnership with Lexico.com, which is powered by the Oxford University Press, but Dictionary.com is an American website (still contains British spellings) and contains words which are not in Lexico and vice versa. So it will be interesting to see whether Countdown will reject this, and now use just one dictionary for adjudication in the studio and in the gallery. It currently uses Oxford Dictionaries Premium as the main source and Lexico as a second source, which they cross over to if they search for a word in Premium and it isn’t valid. I reckon they’ll just use Premium now, but it will make dictionary error tickets on Apterous less accessible, as some users are not willing to pay the annual subscription fee to access the more voluminous and more accurate OD Premium while Lexico is free.

It's basically a different dictionary, so I can't see it being used for adjudication. Your casual player will no longer have a free reference source that reflects the dictionary used by the show.

Maybe time for Countdown to bite the bullet and go CSW...

It might be possible that dictionary.com introduce a feature to filter based on "English" or they might just do a good job of specifying in the definitions of something is English or not.

JackHurst wrote: ↑Fri Aug 12, 2022 6:00 am It might be possible that dictionary.com introduce a feature to filter based on "English" or they might just do a good job of specifying in the definitions of something is English or not.

It's not just that - things like girliest are specified, assuming the superlative isn't US only.
Lots of stuff missing (orangite to pick an example) which of course they might be adding over the next two weeks, but I suspect we're getting it as is.
And new alts - e.g. voertsek https://www.dictionary.com/browse/voetsek (although correctly classified as interjection rather than verb - cheerio voetseked!)

Unless they're changing it to match lexico which seems unlikely, it's going to be a very different. I can't remember whether the 'rules' provided to the contestants point them at lexico - maybe a recent contestant can confirm?

My copy of the dictionary guidelines (although this is getting on for two years ago now) started with "For all editions of Countdown we now use the Oxford Dictionary website as our method of
adjudication (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/)" - no mention of Lexico.

Although now that I follow the link, it redirects to a genreal OUP landing page, and the dropdown list of "Our dictionaries" includes Lexico among them.

Philip A wrote: ↑Thu Aug 11, 2022 11:37 pm So it will be interesting to see whether Countdown will reject this, and now use just one dictionary for adjudication in the studio and in the gallery.

I emailed them to ask, and the response was that Oxford always has and always will be the source of truth for word adjudication. Lexico has been a backup for cases where the Oxford site is down or has crashed.

So it seems highly unlikely that being valid in dictionary.com will suddenly make a word valid in Countdown.

I don’t think the guidelines I was given mentioned Lexico either, but when Lexico used to have the US and UK dictionaries under one section, these words used to be considered valid https://www.apterous.org/ticket_view.ph ... 949#p64856 and I learnt about the use of Lexico here https://www.apterous.org/ticket_view.ph ... 006#p65456. Also in my quarter-final in 2018, OUTEARN (not valid any more) was going to be disallowed until they searched it in Lexico, then Susie explained about the two dictionaries. At the turn of 2020, Lexico separated the US section from the UK, which meant the US words (incl. OUTEARN) had to be revoked from Apto https://www.apterous.org/ticket_view.ph ... 257#p67719.

Yes, I also doubt they’ll use Dictionary.com.

This all raises the question: "What the Hell even is Lexico?"

I always just assumed it was some site run by the Oxford Dictionary people but just as a free version of their premium thing. But then I did wonder why it had the random URL lexico.com. I also wondered why they made no effort to shove you in the direction of the premium version. Anyway now I'm thinking it's just some site run by some random people who happened to just use the Oxford word list, presumably with their agreement and some exchange of the monies. And now they're jumping ship to dictionary.com (or actually just disappearing altogether but arbitarily sending their users in the direction of dictionary.com for reasons unknown).

When we first started using the online dictionary, as can be seen in this thread, the original URL we were given was http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english - this now redirects to Lexico. And the premium version uses the same domain, so maybe the free online version was owned by Oxford Dictionaries and then splintered off? I dunno - it all seems a bit weird.

It’s pronounced Leh-hi-coh. I know that because in Meh-hi-co, I travelled in a ta-hi cab.

It also contains a Spanish dictionary, hence the Spanish name. You can find more about Lexico here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexico

Interesting, thanks.

No problem. Of course it’s lecks-i-co.

Philip A wrote: ↑Fri Aug 12, 2022 1:53 pm No problem. Of course it’s lecks-i-co.

What a lexi-con you pulled there!

Just wondering if there are any pirates out there or someone managed to copy the source code onto another website If anyone knows then please send me a link to it Many thanks and much appreciated !!

Arthur Page wrote: ↑Sat Aug 20, 2022 10:30 am Just wondering if there are any pirates out there or someone managed to copy the source code onto another website If anyone knows then please send me a link to it Many thanks and much appreciated !!

Even if somebody did manage to reverse engineer the front end website you'd have no hope of them doing the same with the backend data source.

It has now gone.

Philip A wrote: ↑Fri Aug 12, 2022 1:53 pm No problem. Of course it’s lecks-i-co.

By the way, my comment thanking you was about the link to the Wikipedia article, not your little fake fact about the pronunciation!