Antidote 10 User Guide

 Attention — This page presents content from an old edition. Consult the documentation for the current release instead.

User Guide / Introduction

Introduction

Language is an organic whole. From glyph to sentence, from page to novel, a remarkable amount of knowledge, reasoning, and emotion come into play. Typography, lexicon, syntax, grammar, semantics, style and rhythm — all these and more are called on to contribute. And each comes with its own set of rules, conventions and pitfalls.

Harnessing the power of the computer, we sought to bring together the great reference works on the English language: dictionaries covering definitions, conjugations, synonyms and more, as well as guides that cover grammar, style, typography and punctuation. Moreover, we wanted to create a tool that would put this wealth of information into practice: a corrector.

This ambition gave rise to Antidote, now in its tenth edition.

Antidote is intended for English speakers the world over. People in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia will find in Antidote not just the words that are common to standard English, but also the lexical and syntactic particularities of their country — in all of Antidote’s resources.

Antidote’s corrector is also designed for second-language speakers of English, who bravely set out to master its intricacies. It recognizes, corrects and explains errors and expressions typical of non-native speakers and of varying degrees of linguistic proficiency.

In creating Antidote, we wanted to render the treasures of the English language available to as diverse an audience as possible. Naturally, this involves shedding light on its difficulties, but above all laying out all the richness of English. It is our hope that Antidote will help you enjoy the language more.

This introduction offers a brief overview of the principles that govern the operation of Antidote and the content of its many resources. The chapters that follow provide a more detailed description of how each of these functions.