How do you look up a word if you don’t know how it’s spelled? That used to be a pesky question, but no more now with the advent of spell-checker and auto-suggestions at search boxes with search engines. As a matter of fact, Google Search provides a special operator “Define:” to perform what dictionaries or thesauri can do, and some more. If you want to see a list of definitions from various online sources, you may input “define:” followed by a word or phrase. The results in a list such generated are generally relevant, comprehensive, and up to date.

With the ease of using the “Define:” feature, not only is the wealth of etymology and usage of  certain words accessible to us, but also open to us are the doors to other relevant resources. For example, I have demonstrated "Define:" to a few library users in diciphering words (knowing not necessarily the spellings) such as “a capella”; dearth; polymath; and recidivism. The few users were all pleased with the search technique as well as the quality of the results.

For myself this time, I googled “Define:Virtual” and got a list of about 4,570,000,000 results. Displayed at the top of the page are Pronunciation (phonetics & audio,) Definitions, Synonyms, and links to More info »Wikipedia - Dictionary.com - Answers.com - Merriam-Webster, followed by relevant web resources, such as Second Life, Wikipedia article, etc.

To hone in on a few projects of interest to me, I experimented with the search results Options and Tools (e. g., Images, News, Blogs, Related Searches, and Time) shown on the left-hand navigation panel. With the aid of these filters, I should be able to explore further and discover plenty of expert resources beyond what I realized so far.

For the time being, I am satisfied with the information provided by the sites ranked high on this list of results. I would share with you a particular passage from the “Usage Note” on the above mentioned Answers.com: “The adjectives virtual and digital and the prefixes e- and cyber- are all used in various ways to denote things, activities, and organizations that are realized or carried out chiefly in an electronic medium. There is considerable overlap in the use of these items: people may speak either of virtual communities or of cybercommunities and of e-cash or cybercash.” 

For levitation, please look on the same page for a cartoon, “Virtual Ice Fishing.” Funny!

Image  Courtesy: U. S. Department of Energy.