How Helpful Are Online English Learners' Dictionaries in Dealing with Misspellings?

This study looks at how well the leading monolingual English learners’ dictionaries in their online versions cope with misspelled words as search terms. Seven such dictionaries (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, free online version; Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, premium subscription version; Merriam-Webster's English Learner's Online Dictionary; Macmillan English Dictionary Online; Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary; Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary; and Google English Dictionary) are tested on a corpus of misspellings produced by Polish, Japanese, and Finnish learners of English. The performance of the dictionaries varies widely, but is in general disappointing. In a large proportion of cases, the dictionaries fail to supply the intended word, and when they do, they do not place it at the top of the list of suggested alternatives. Results are then compared with those from one year ago for the same dictionaries and the same misspellings. A detailed analysis follows, identifying some of the mechanisms behind the failures in identifying and correcting misspellings. The success rates of the dictionaries are compared with that of an experimental context-free spellchecker developed by the second author, and the spellchecker is found to be markedly superior. The data are subjected to a cluster analysis to see if the dictionaries can be grouped based solely on their performance. The article concludes with suggestions on how to improve the performance of the spellchecking facilities in online dictionaries. 1. The role of spelling in dictionary consultation A painful limitation of traditional paper dictionaries — at least for the most popular type of semasiological dictionaries for languages with alphabetic writing systems — is that the primary access route requires the user to be familiar with the access alphabet of the dictionary (Nielsen 1995), and to know how the target item is spelled. With reference to the first point, users of modern electronic dictionaries are indeed (if only up to a point) ‘liberated from the straitjacket of ... alphabetical order’ (Atkins 1996: 516). However, the second point remains a valid concern: the user still needs to know how to spell the target word, or at least to enter something sufficiently close that the dictionary can find the required entry. Of course, dictionary users cannot always be expected to replicate standard English spelling. Sometimes they make typos — ‘performance errors’; sometimes they just don’t know the correct spelling and they make a guess (or they think they know it but they’re wrong) — ‘competence errors’. For competence errors in particular, misspelling patterns typical of native speakers of English may be different from those of learners of English (Mitton and Okada 2007). Further, online dictionaries are increasingly used in conjunction with online work and entertainment, such as when learners of English attempt to look up a word which they hear being