Dictionary.com's Free iPhone App

LESS than a week after I coughed up a whopping $4 for the excellent WordBook dictionary and thesaurus app for the iPhone, Dictionary.com has released its own (free!) dictionary app. Download it here.

WordBook claims 220k definitions; the Dictionary.com app claims 275k. Both feature a companion thesaurus, word(s) of the day, etymologies, and audio pronunciations. The WordBook app also has some bonus features like wildcard search and online integration with Wikipedia, but these aren't particularly essential.

The financial hit is much more tolerable this time around, but this reminds me of the time I, in a fit of reference mania, bought the entire OED on CD for hundreds of dollars. I was using Windows 98 at the time, and the CD was rendered obsolete three years later with the arrival of Windows XP. The publisher couldn't have cared less and made this quite clear. No upgrade discount, no cross-platform discount (for my eventual migration to a Mac), no sympathy. Even if I'd wanted to, I wouldn't have been able to use my OED CD-ROM to look up the definition of sucker.