16. Dictionaries in electronic form Hilary Nesi in: Cowie, A. P. (ed) The Oxford History of English Lexicography

 
16.3 Handheld electronic dictionaries 
Early electronics companies had begun working on the development of handheld 
gadgets for use in business and the sciences at around the same time as computers 
were first being used to support dictionary compilation. Kay’s concept of the 
Dynabook 
(1968), envisaged as ‘a portable interactive personal computer, as 
accessible as a book’ (Kay and Goldberg 1977, Wilson 2001) was the forerunner of 
the modern personal digital assistant (PDA). This took many years to develop, 
however, and was preceded by the first commercial hand-held electronic calculator, 
the Canon Pocketronic, in 1970/1971, and Hewlett-Packard's HP-65 calculator in 
1974, the first calculator with removable storage. The Xerox NoteTaker, a suitcase-
sized portable computer based on the Dynabook design, appeared in 1976 (Koblentz 
2005).

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4 
The first electronic ‘dictionaries’ with interfaces designed for human users were an 
offshoot of calculator and PDA technology, and became available in 1978. These 
were the LK-3000 produced by the Lexicon Corporation, Florida (the rights were 
acquired by Nixdorf (now Siemens) in 1979), the Craig M100 produced by the Craig 
Corporation, Japan, and Speak & Spell, an educational toy produced by Texas 
Instruments. The LK-3000, also known as the Lexicon, was designed in 1976 and 
patented in 1979 as an ‘electronic dictionary and language interpreter’ (US patent 
number 4158236). Housed in a small (159x102 mm) case, it had a 33-button keyboard 
and a 16-character screen to display equivalencies between words in English and a 
number of other languages (initially French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese and 
Spanish). The language translation facilities (one or two thousand words for each 
language) were sold separately in removable cartridges. Garfield (1979: 277) 
complained that the Lexicon wordlists had not been compiled with reference to 
frequency, and that it lacked ‘some of the most obvious and necessary words’. He also 
found that only single-word translations were given for word forms with more than 
one meaning, such as watch (both noun and verb were translated as montre
in 
French). 
Nevertheless Garfield thought the Lexicon 
a ‘marvellous technological feat’ (1979: 
279), and according to Koblentz (2005: 6) the device was selected as the official 
translation tool for the 1980 Olympics, and was considered so powerful that it was 
used by the US National Security Agency as the basis for developing a handheld 
encryption tool. The Craig M100, launched shortly after the Lexicon in 1978, had a 
similar 
design but ‘a wider, more complete vocabulary than the Lexicon’ and the 
ability to translate to and from three languages simultaneously (Garfield 1979: 277). 
About 200,000 Lexicon and Craig translators were sold worldwide in 1979 (Garfield 
1980: 574). 

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While the LK-3000 and the Craig M100 matched translation equivalents, Speak & 
Spell drew on new developments in computer-based speech synthesis to link lexical 
input to speech data. The first text-to-speech system for English had been created in 
Japan in 1968, and had been further developed at the Bell Laboratories in the early 
1970s (Klatt 1987: 757). In 1976 the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the blind had put 
the technology to practical use (Klatt 1987: 756) and, recognizing the potential of 
speech synthesis for language learning, Texas Instruments went on to design Speak & 
Spell, a toy to help children learn commonly misspelled words. Speak & Spell had a 
40-button keyboard and an eight-character display screen. Ten different cartridge 
libraries were available, each containing about a thousand words at various levels of 
difficulty, from basic function words to homonyms. The words were stored in the 
same way that a calculator stores numbers, processed through an integrated circuit 
model of the human vocal tract, and pronounced in standard American English 
(Woerner 2001, Maxey 2006). Texas Instruments went on to produce Speak & Spell 
models for the French, German, Spanish and British English markets, and also Speak 
& Read (first appearing in 1980), which used an electronic voice and programmed 
activities to help children build their reading skills. Speak & Read had eight different 
cartridge libraries, to practice about a thousand lexical items from basic rhyming 
words (at level one) to silent letter combinations (at level three) (Woerner 2001).
Speak & Spell became a design classic, and versions continued to be produced until 
1992. The Speak & Spell automated voice featured in electronic dance music of the 
1980s, and the device appeared in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial 
(1982) 
as the toy that E.T. adapted to ‘phone home’ (Woerner 2001). 
Texas Instruments used Speak & Spell speech synthesis technology when it moved 
into the market for handheld translating devices in 1979. The Language Tutor 

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(renamed the Language Translator the following year) translated between several 
European languages but was technically identical to Speak & Spell, although it 
retailed at a much higher price. A cheaper version without the speaker, called the 
Language Teacher, was introduced in 1980 (Woerner 2001). Each language module 
for the Language Tutor was sold separately, with no cross-referencing between 
modules and quite a limited range of lexical items. The French/English
module, for 
example, stored 360 individual words and 78 phrases that could be spoken and 
displayed, and an additional 239 words which appeared on screen but were not 
pronounced.
The Language Translator was closely followed by other speaking translators 
produced by Sharp Electronics and Matsushita Electric, the parent company of 
Panasonic (Berger 1979), and in the 1980s other major electronics companies such as 
Casio, Franklin and Seiko also began developing speaking dictionaries. Cator (1983: 
197) observed that ‘manufacturers from vending machines to automobiles are literally 
racing each other to produce the first integrated speech synthesizers in their products’.
Other advances in the 1980s included the development of spell-checking functions, 
first used in text-processing systems such as IBM Displaywriter, launched in 1980 
(IBM Archives, undated), and SpellStar, an add-
on to MicroPro’s popular WordStar 
word processing program. In 1986 Franklin Electronic Publishers produced the SA-88 
Spelling Ace
, billed as ‘the world's first portable spell checker’. The Spelling Ace was 
a word list rather than a dictionary, but it recognised many erroneous ‘phonetic’ 
spellings (such as g-e-r-a-f for giraffe) and for spell-checking purposes this gave it an 
obvious advantage over paper-based dictionaries. With the success of this product 
Franklin moved out of the desktop computer business to concentrate on handheld 
electronic devices. It still produces Spelling Ace (now with an additional thesaurus 

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function and games, exercises and study list creation features) as part of its sizeable 
current range of electronic reference products including children’s dictionaries, 
speaking dictionaries, bilin
gual dictionaries and ‘travel translators’.
Although handheld dictionary technology continued to improve, drawing on new 
developments in graphical gaming devices such as those featured in Nintendo’s 
GameBoy (a handheld console launched in 1989), capacity was still relatively limited. 
Manufacturers began exploring additional means of storing dictionary information, on 
removable IC (Integrated Circuit) cards, which had been developed at Honeywell Bull 
in the 1970s, and on CD-ROMs, launched by Philips and Sony in 1984. Small (8cm) 
CD-ROMs were used to store reference works for the Sony Data Discman, a 
development of the Dynabook concept with a 10-line LCD screen, first marketed in 
Japan in 1990. The more powerful Sony Bookman which came out in 1992 used 
cartridges to store texts, and nowadays its descendent the eBookman, a palm-sized 
PDA, stores some lexicographical material on memory cards but offers many 
additional electronic dictionaries for download from the internet. Titles for the 
modern eBookman (produced by Franklin since 1995) include dictionaries in the 
Oxford, Merriam-Webster, Collins GEM and Klett-Pons series.
Sharpe (1995) provides an overview of the range of electronic dictionary types 
available in Japan in the mid 1990s. He identifies six broad categories:
A 
portable handheld dictionaries, which could be as small as a bank card or a 
pocket calculator, with data held on IC cards. Some of these offered audio 
pronunciation (via headphones)
B 
electronic notebooks, ‘an expanded version of A offering extra-linguistic 
functions’ 

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C 
CD-ROM dictionaries, with either 12cm disks to use with a desktop 
computer, or 8cm disks to use with a portable electronic book such as the 
Data Discman or Datapress (National Panasonic)
D 
dictionary software for use on a desktop computer 
E 
dictionaries on floppy disc to use with an electronic notebook, such as the 
Toshiba Xtend PN10. These had a smaller storage capacity than 
dictionaries of types C and D but data could be transferred from the 
notebook to a compatible PC 
F 
a dictionary in a small desk-top device linked to a handheld OCR scanner. 
The user could input the search word via a keyboard, or scan it in 
The Canon Wordtank IDX-7500 (1993) is described in particular detail by Sharpe. 
This was a popular type-A dictionary wh
ich could be opened like a book, ‘about the 
size of two cigarette packets’, with a 9cm by 4cm screen and a 16Mb memory 
capacity. This device contained three interconnected dictionaries (Japanese-English, 
English-Japanese and kanji-Japanese), a last look-up 
recall function, and a ‘Word 
Memo’ mode to record and test word knowledge. It was also possible to expand the 
database by adding extra IC cards containing lexical and language information such as 
example sentences, synonyms and antonyms, or lists of business terms. 
Bolinger (1990: 145) predicted that the ‘hand-held computer’ would eventually 
supersede dictionaries in the traditional book format. This prediction was quite daring 
at the time, as the manufacturers seemed to be more concerned with technological 
innovation than with lexicographical information, and on the whole handheld 
electronic dictionaries had escaped the attention of metalexicographers. When 
reviewed at all, evaluations tended to be negative. Sharpe (1995: 48), for example, 

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complained that most handheld electronic dictionaries in Japan did not expand much 
on the content of their printed sources, despite the potential of IC cards to store a 
much greater range of grammatical and lexical information. Taylor and Chan found 
that only 28% of handheld electronic devices they surveyed at the City Polytechnic of 
Hong Kong provided examples of word use, in addition to direct Chinese-English 
translation (1994: 600). The twelve Hong Kong teachers they interviewed preferred 
their students to use printed dictionaries. Similarly, Koren (1997) reported that Israeli 
schools rejected electronic dictionaries as a matter of policy, because most of them 
did not contain ‘types of information such as varieties of word meanings, word 
families, parts of speech, te
nse, usage and idioms, etc.’ Taylor and Chan also reported 
that in 1992 the Hong Kong consumer council had filed 30 complaints about hand-
held electronic dictionaries, relating to such faults as inaccurate spelling, poor 
pronunciation, and limited vocabulary.
However, as the technology became more sophisticated, as respected publishing 
houses produced more electronic publications which could be made available for 
download, and as the memory size of handheld devices increased, the traditional 
divide between the dictionary in a mobile device (intended for quick reference in 
practical contexts) and the academic dictionary (prized for the quality of its 
lexicographic information) began to disappear. Electronics companies gradually 
began to purchase licenses for established lexicographical products, such as Collins 
COBUILD, Longman and Oxford dictionaries, adding to these resources the benefits 
derived from the latest technical inventions. The electronic licensing partner list for 
Oxford University Press, for example, now includes AOnePro, Canon, Casio, 
Franklin, Seiko, Sharp and Sony (for handheld electronic dictionaries and PDAs), 

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Enfour (for internet-enabled mobile phones) and C-Pen and WizCom (for reading 
pens).
Yagi and Nakanishi (2003) distinguish b
etween the first generation ‘partial content’ 
electronic translators, which only installed a small proportion of the headwords and 
definitions contained in a printed dictionary source, and the second generation ‘full 
content’ devices, which provided the full texts of published print dictionaries, 
including example sentences. According to Nakamura (2003: 346) Seiko Instruments 
was the first company to produce a second generation device. The Seiko TR-700, 
published in 1982, enabled users to search the entire contents of an English-Japanese 
Dictionary, a Japanese-English Dictionary 
and Roget’s Thesaurus. Seiko later 
manufactured the 
first monolingual English learners’ dictionary to appear in the 
handheld electronic format, the Hand-Held Longman Dictionary of Contemporary 
English (1995), based on the second edition of LDOCE, although this was only 
marketed in Japan. Developments in compression and decompression technology 
have since made it possible to store and integrate an ever larger quantity of full-
content dictionaries. The Seiko SR-T6500, for example, produced in 2003, contained 
nine full-text dictionaries despite being only a third of the size and weight of the old 
TR-700 (Nakamura 2003: 346). Nakamura reports on the trend towards integrating as 
many as th
irty dictionaries in one device, with a ‘jump function’ that allows users to 
highlight an unknown word in a definition in one dictionary, and jump to another 
dictionary to look up the meaning. ‘This kind of function makes it easier for English 
learners to access English-English dictionaries, because of the instantaneousness and 
accessibility of the other bilingual dictionaries’ (Nakamura 2003: 349). 
Nowadays many handheld electronic dictionaries offer natural-sounding voice 
simulation, pronunciation of extended text, and speech recognition to translate 

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between languages. The most recent, such as the Besta CyberDict VIII, also include 
video sequences for English language learning, and stylus and touch panel 
handwriting recognition (the system ‘learns’ to respond to the user’s individual 
handwriting style). 
The latest speech recognition facilities are a step towards Crystal’s 
‘ideal lexicographical world’ (1986:79), where a database is addressed through a 
voice-activated terminal. The usefulness of Sobkowia
k’s proposed phonetic-access 
dictionary ‘beyond the year 2000’ (1994: 509), in which ‘the isolated spoken word is 
looked up directly in a phonetically transcribed lexicon’ has been queried by 
metalexicographers such as Koren (1997) because success depends 
on the user’s 
ability to pronounce the search word correctly. Current handheld dictionary 
manufacturers try to turn this difficulty to their advantage, however. Ectaco advertises 
its Partner EC800 
‘talking dictionary’ by pointing out that speech recognition enables 
users to practise their 
pronunciation skills: ‘Test your pronunciation by trying to speak 
out a phrase in the foreign language and see if the Partner understands you. If it does, 
then everyone else would understand your speech too!’
A further development in hand-held dictionary technology has been the so-called 
‘reading’ pen. Fuji Xerox first marketed Hyper Synony, a bilingual English-Japanese 
electronic dictionary with scanning capability, in 1992 (Sharpe 1995: 41). This early 
device was about the size of a modern laptop and was wired up to a separate handheld 
scanner, but in the late 1990s the Israeli company WizCom Technologies developed a 
pen-shaped dictionary which scanned words on the page and showed their most 
common translations or definitions on an integral screen. The first WizCom reading 
pen was marketed in Europe in 1997 (Koren 1997), and was shortly followed by the 
C-Pen, a similar product developed by a Swedish company (C Technologies AB 
1999; Bergeron 2001). WizCom’s QuickLink and Quicktionary pens and the C-Pen 

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continue to be developed and are sold in a number of different versions, some of 
which are able to store and retrieve previous search words, read scanned text and 
definitions aloud, and transfer scanned text directly to PC or PDA applications. 
Wizcom’s Quicktionary II Genius, for example, launched by Taishukan Publishing 
Company in Japan in 2003, contained the Genius English-Japanese Dictionary (third 
edition) and offered users the choice of condensed and expanded formats of each 
dictionary entry: ‘the option of viewing a quick explanation or full definition of any 
scanned word’ (Wizcom 2003a). The English Reading Pen, targeted at users with 
reading disabilities and launched in London in 2003, contained the Concise Oxford 
English Dictionary (COD
) (tenth edition), and had a ‘test mode’ feature to block 
dictionary access during exams, while permitting the user to scan words and hear 
them spoken aloud (Wizcom 2003b). The Wizcom SuperPen Professional Complete 
English Dictionary Pen (2006) offers the texts of nine Houghton Mifflin reference 
works (such as the Office Edition of the fourth American Heritage Dictionary,), has 
text-to-speech capability, and can capture, store and transfer up to 1,000 pages of 
printed text.
Despite these huge increases in capability, the small dimensions of the handheld 
computer screen still mean that the user cannot see the full range of information 
available in a longer dictionary entry without scrolling down the page, and can rarely 
view a number of entries simultaneously. There have been big improvements in this 
respect: first generation Casio dictionaries could display only 2 lines, with only 12 
characters per line, but by 2003 some models could display up to 52 characters per 
line, and up to 17 lines of scrolling text (Yagi and Nakanishi 2003). In 2003, however, 
Casio was still aiming ‘to overcome its disadvantage of less information at a glance 
compared with the conventional printed dictionary’ (Yagi and Nakanishi 2003: 344). 

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Some recent handheld dictionaries have five-inch screens, but any further increase in 
size would severely limit portability. The Sharp PW-C8000 (2004) appears to be 
unique in offering the option to connect to a television set to view its reference 
material, but this may not be the ideal display mode for most dictionary users, who 
are probably more inclined to consult their dictionaries while reading and writing at 
their computers than when sitting in front of their TVs.