Dictionary Stats for '05
December 15, 2005.Merry Christmas to you all. After the success of last year's article about the top statistics for our dictionary, we wanted to bring you the 2005 edition of our annual review of definition searches performed over the last twelve months.
On the average, there were 12,000 unique visits to our site during each month of the year. For the second consecutive year, the busiest months were September and March, with the number of visitors declining during the summer.
Here are some interesting results:
- The definition with the highest number of searches was hurricane. This can undoubtedly be explained by hurricane Katrina which hit Louisiana at the end of August. Considered to be one of the biggest hurricanes in United States recorded history, the storm caused major damage along the coastlines of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.
- The definition with the highest percentage growth were blog and globalization. Blogs, an abbreviation for web logs, are a new way for people to publish personal articles on the Internet. Whether you "blog" for money or for passion, the number of online bloggers, the name of people who publish a blog, keeps increasing by the millions. Blogs are considered a new phenomena in our modern society, but many people still apparently do not know how to define them.
- Approximately a thousand new definitions were entered in the dictionary. Nouns still represent the majority of the entries (60%). Many new definitions were related to medical terms (16%), legal (8%) or technology (12%).
- The words most frequently misspelled were eminent, imminent and immanent. These words are part of the official list of frequent English typos. Click on the words to get their definition.
- Many people have started to use our new synonym and antonym dictionary which, until recently, was in beta. Some inspirational synonym searches were performed during the year, with synonyms for love and synonyms for happy topping the synonym searches at # 1 and # 3 on our list respectively. Antonym definitions were not that uplifting, with alcoholic being one of the most frequent online antonym searches.
- There was no change in the definition categories, or in the most bizarre definitions in the dictionary. Honorificabilitudinitatibus is still the longest word in the dictionary, although long is a relative concept because this word is still significantly shorter than the absolute winner, which is comprised of a full 1,913 characters. For those who are interested, the word is here ;-) (Sources: BBC)
We wish you much success and happiness in 2006. Many new projects are under way and you should see major improvements to our dictionary in the coming months. The dictionary will let you define words simply and easily and, as always, there will be absolutely no charge for this valuable service.
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