There have been lots of articles today in newspapers because the Oxford English Dictionary publishers have claimed that people are confused and choosing words incorrectly. For example “pouring” instead of “poring”. The problem being that people are basing the word choice on the sound and thus homonyms (or homophones if you prefer) are confused. There are quite a lot of words that sound the same but different meaning, for example caret (a typographical mark and the blinking insertion point in a text editor) and carrot (vegetable).
However I offer a simple solution: Have a brief definition of the word in the spell checker. Visual Studio already does this for programming languages so adding it to word processors is hardly difficult. The only issue really is likely to be disk space. If this is really a concern maybe some kind of online system? But I really don’t think it’s much of an issue given the current size of word processor installations anyway.
It would allow writers to check whether the word that they selected had the correct meaning. Multiple meanings could also be listed, either in a list or with some kind of rotating display.
Possibly it might even improve the quality of written english online? Of course it may be that there is a word processor that already does this. In which case the idea isn’t as original as I thought… but I would definitely like this feature in my word processor and even more so in system wide spell checking. 🙂
[Edited: Because I suggested that Caret and Carrot were spelt the same.]
Absolutely fantastic idea.
Best way forward, would be to have a brief description stored locally – similar to that of a built-in thesaurus – Then if the user wants a fuller decription, it is downloaded from the web.
What about OpenOffice.org they might consider it.