Free German Online Dictionary adds Spelling Reform

Basel, Switzerland - November 20, 2006 – Canoo today announced that it has added the August 2006 spelling reform changes to its online German dictionaries and grammar at Canoo.net.  All entries affected by the reform have been updated to reflect the new spelling. With 250’000 entries generating more than 3 million inflected word forms, Canoo.net is the most comprehensive spelling dictionary and German grammar resource available on the Net.

New Design for Spelling Dictionary

The spelling dictionary has been redesigned and provides a much better, easily understandable access to the spelling data.

New Words Added

The new dictionary release features a number of new words such as:

• googeln  - German for to search for an item at Google;
• barrierefrei -  replaces the more archaic behindertengerecht

In addition, several change requests and typos reported by Canoo.net users have been corrected in the dictionaries and the grammar pages.

Language resources at Canoo.net

Canoo.net currently registers 800,000 visits per month. All content can be accessed via hyperlink from any external web site, document, or digital presentation. Teachers and students may use these web addresses to refer to a particular section at Canoo.net as part of a web-based exercise or tutorial. Canoo.net includes:

• Over 250,000 lexicon entries with spelling, inflection, morphology, and word formation dictionaries for all data,
• Direct links to and from LEO, the largest German-English dictionary on the Internet,
• An online grammar providing over 1500 pages of grammatical explanations in German and in English.

The spelling dictionary is widely used to check if and how a word is affected by the German spelling reform. It includes Swiss and Austrian spelling variants. The inflection tables are useful to check the correct form of a word. There are numerous cross-references between the grammar and dictionaries, offering a high-quality, truly interactive language resource for German speakers and learners.

Canoo.net is based on WMTrans products, demonstrating how this morphology software is integrated into language learning applications. For more information, please see the WMTrans product site at http://www.canoo.com/wmtrans and the corresponding demo page.

About Canoo

Canoo Engineering is a leader in Web front-end application development and delivers Java-based software consulting services and products. It was founded in 1999 by a team of senior executives and software engineers. The company is privately held and is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. Besides UltraLightClient, a software library for Swing-based Rich Internet Applications; the Canoo product range includes WMTrans, a software library for language analysis and generation; and Webtest, an open-source, XP-style functional testing tool for Java-based web applications.

Canoo is exhibiting at JavaPolis from 13th to 14th December 2006 in Antwerp, Belgium.