Google Glossary
Google Search, Google Images, Google Groups, Google News?where will it all end? While you're thinking about that, check out Google Glossary, an experimental interface for searching online glossaries. Can it deliver the goods? I asked it to search for "scope creep" and here's what it dredged up from the Web:
Scope creep is the slow and continuous expansion of the scope or a project, such as data type or routine, resulting in a broad, unfocused, and unmanageable scope and usually leads to cost-overruns, missed deadlines, and loss of original goals. http://it.ojp.gov/
What happens when people have bright ideas for minor improvements to the design. Great ideas they may be (like Hey! It'd be really cool to separate delivery and invoice addresses to allow gifts), but if they're not in the agreed scope, you don't do them without a Change Request being accepted. Otherwise your work ends up being substantially more than you agreed to, but your budget and timescales haven't changed. http://test.evolt.org/
The gradual addition of extra effort or size of deliverables. Each addition may be so small that it could be overlooked in terms of its impact on the completion of the project, but the cumulative effect could be considerable. http://www.wm.edu/
The tendency for the size and expense of projects to grow while they are being worked on - and after original budgets and designs have been approved. http://governing.com/
Cool, eh? And the results came with the advice: "Look up scope creep at Dictionary.com or Merriam-Webster".
Only English definitions are featured at the moment; enter anything in another language and you get bizarre results. I tried with the German "Zukunftsvision" and was directed to the charmingly named "Serendipity corner", where the offerings included: "Pleurisy, Stock Dividend, Richter Scale, Transcoding, Budget Adjustment, web-casting, Asking bid, felsic." According to the Encarta World English Dictionary, that last word means: "containing light-coloured silicate minerals: used to describe igneous rocks or minerals that are light in colour, indicating relatively high levels of quartz and feldspars".
Whither Google Glossary? Beefed up with a thesaurus section? Included in the main-stream search? Added to the toolbar? There's a feedback button and a discussion forum for those who wish to suggest features for the next release. So, translators, teachers, language students, editors and writers take a look and help build a useful language tool.
