In a week where Google has celebrated St Andrews Day, revealed 2009's Zeitgeist, made paywall concessions, started a town modelling competition, confronted Mandelson, faded in its homepage, buddied up with Twitter and launched DNS servers, the company has yet another new project. It's called Google Dictionary.

It does definitions, translations and synonyms, but there's a few extra little bits of functionality that your dog-eared copy of the OED can't do. It can pull in content from external sources like Wikipedia and Princton University's Wordnet and you can "star" particular words to come back to later.

Some of this functionality was available with the prefix "Define:" before on the search engine, but this will make it a little more accessible to users. Dictionary companies claim they're not worried, though, saying that the service is fine for consumers but not enough for students and academics.

Oh, and if you're wondering, according to Google, "to google" means: "search the internet (for information) using the Google search engine, 'He googled the woman he had met at the party', 'My children are googling all day'".

Via: latimesblogs.latimes.com

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