Spell Check

I was commenting on a blog post last night and wanted to use a word that I couldn't spell. This happens more than I would care to admit. My verbal vocabulary is, well, above average. My spelling skills? Not so much. Often I can just use spell check and move on. But sometimes I use words that the spell check doesn't know. It's not a problem though, because I have the nearly endless World Wide Web at my fingertips. Just a hop, skip, and a jump over to dictionary.com for the correct spelling.

That was where I journeyed last night. I pulled up the familiar site. But wait, something was different. It was fancy. There were games, helpful language-related tips, and sitting on the left-hand side of the page was the word of the day: uxorious. It was not the word I was looking for, but it was amusing. "Well," I thought, "this is kind of fun."

Then I typed my word into the search bar: dalliance. Actually, I typed 'dalience,' but I was directed to the correct spelling. And since I wanted to double check that that was really the word I wanted to use for this particular comment, I clicked on the link to take me to the definition.

I was directed to the page describing the origin of the word. Okay, that's interesting, now on to the definition. Except I couldn't get to the definition. All I could access for dalliance was the origin.

Really dictionary.com? You're not going to tell me what a word means?

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I direct you to Merriam-Webster's website for all your word defining needs?

Epilogue:

I looked up dalliance at dictionary.com again while I was writing this post. I was given the definition this time. I have no idea why it didn't work before. Maybe because I had misspelled it and the website deemed me unworthy to know the meaning of a word I couldn't spell?

Also, this post made me think of the one and only show I've seen on Broadway. Here's a clip from their performance at the Tony's in 2005. They really did bring an audience member into the show for every performance, although when I saw it the Reverend Al Sharpton was not in attendance.