What's the word of the day? And what does it mean? And, um, how exactly do you pronounce it? Providing that information, along with the same for every other word in the knowledge-needing, Internet savvy world, is the main prerogative of Dictionary.com, the online and mobile lexicon that has over 50 million users per month – standing out as the world's most downloaded dictionary.
On Monday, Dictionary.com, whose family of sites includes Thesaurus.com and Reference.com, announced the availability of its Dictionary.com app for BlackBerry – both on its BlackBerry 10 smartphone device and tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook. The Dictionary.com app has been an offering for the iPhone, iPad, and Android for a while, and the move into BlackBerry terrain is a curious one. The company aims to appeal largely to students, and students aren't typically BlackBerry users. In fact, last October, the New York Times ran an article calling the BlackBerry the “black sheep,” and polled users who admitted to feeling shame for still using a BlackBerry as opposed to one of the other newer, ostensibly more exciting smartphones.
There are still plenty of BlackBerry users out there, though – shamed or not – and a lot of those users (particularly older ones) aren't budging to learn a whole new technology just for the sake of trendiness, etc. So when Lisa Sullivan-Cross, the vice president of marketing and business development at Dictionary.com, says that “by offering Dictionary.com for BlackBerry 10 and the BlackBerry PlayBook, we hope to enrich the lives of professionals in all industries by enabling them to communicate more effectively,” - she's speaking about a fair chunk of people – particularly business people. And, after all, since Dictionary.com is already the ruling lexicon app for other smartphones and tablets, why not rule the whole market?
Dictionary.com for BlackBerry 10 and PlayBook retails for $2.99 (ad-free) and offers content from both Dictionary.com and its tie-in function, Thesaurus.com. The app also allows users to listen to audio pronunciation, as well as receive spelling suggestions and updates. Its “Word of the Day” feature, which sees over a million viewers daily, is also on the app, as is “The Hot Word” feature, which investigates word histories, usage, and trivia.
Edited by
Brooke Neuman