Browsing through the Village Voice (March 4-10, 2015 issue), I came upon an article about music journalist Robert Christgau and his memoir Going Into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man (Dey Street Books). I remember proofreading his copy in the early 1980s when he was the music critic at the Village Voice. (I think it was his sister, Georgia Christgau, who hired me.)
Not seeing Christgau's age mentioned in the piece, I immediately went to Wikipedia to look up his birth date (It's April 18, 1942) and stumbled upon a link to the word "memoir." That led me to the Wiktionary page, which for me, a language buff, was a fascinating discovery. I learned that Wiktionary, the free dictionary, was "a multilingual, web-based project to create a free-content dictionary of all words in all languages."
The project is currently available in 158 languages and is, like Wikipedia, its companion site, "written collaboratively by volunteers" called "wiktionarians." The English-language section, at the time that I checked the site, contained 3, 971,737 entries (and counting).
Although I had trouble using the site on my cell phone, I did click on the highlighted word "free" in the phrase "free dictionary." What popped up on the screen was a language lover's delight: there were
word origin and pronunciation guides, a list of synonyms and antonyms, definitions with literary examples, et cetera. For example, here are two definitions of "free" that appeared in a long list of definitions:
"without; not containing (what is specified);exempt;clean, liberated" as in "We had a wholesome, filling meal, free of meat" and "not currently in use; not taken; unoccupied" as in "You can sit on that chair, it's free."
Once I figure out how to use Wiktionary, it will become a very useful reference tool and I will be consulting it often.
Go to www.wiktionary.org.
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