Antidote 10 User Guide

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User Guide / Personal Dictionaries / Adding an Entry to a Personal Dictionary

Adding an Entry to a Personal Dictionary

When adding a word to a personal dictionary, you must provide some information so that the Antidote corrector can analyze it properly. Be sure to avoid duplicating words for no reason, as it can slow down Antidote’s corrector. Duplicate words will be marked in the list with a yellow triangle.

Headword

Enter the term in this field to show how it is spelled. Enter the word’s uninflected form, i.e. the singular form for a noun and the infinitive without to for a verb.

Categories menu

Choose the syntactic category of the word you are adding (noun, proper noun, adjective, verb, etc.).

Various information

You must tell Antidote about certain semantic, syntactical or morphological properties of the new entry. The type of information to be entered depends on the category of the term.

Adding a noun

Antidote asks you to specify whether your noun denotes a thing or concept (e.g. jewel, butter, joy), a person (e.g. girl, linguist) or an animal (e.g. panther). Check the appropriate box or boxes.

If it is a thing or a concept, you should also check the Uncountable entity box if it can usually not be counted (e.g. joy, water), and the Diploma box if it refers to an academic degree (e.g. B.Sc., Ph.D.).

If it refers to a person, check the Profession box if the noun refers to a trade, profession or specialization (e.g. linguist).

  • For forming the plural, see the Inflection section below.

Adding an adjective

If you are adding an adjective (Australian, for example as in Australian beer) that can also be the name of a resident or native of a place (an Australian), check the Demonym box. If the word also refers to a language (Greek, for example), check the Spoken language box, too. Otherwise, leave these boxes unchecked. Verify that Antidote has inserted the correct form of the comparative and the superlative, i.e. an –er/–est suffix for one-syllable adjectives, or the word more/most for most adjectives with two or more syllables.

Adding an interjection

Do not include an exclamation mark if you add an interjection! Choose one of the three types of interjection suggested: emotional interjection (e.g. damn), message to others (e.g. hello) or sound (e.g. ding).

Adding an adverb

You must specify whether you are adding an adverb of manner (e.g. politely), of time (e.g. today) or of place (e.g. everywhere). Check the appropriate box or boxes. You can check more than one box if your adverb belongs to more than one type. Leave the boxes unchecked if it does not belong to any of these three types (see the Adverb article in the Antidote Grammar guide, in the Other Categories section, for information on all the kinds of adverbs).

Adding a proper noun

Proper nouns normally start with a capital letter. Antidote asks you to specify whether your proper noun is a last name, first name, company or organization name, brand name, place name, demonym (e.g. Australian), title of a work, or other.

If it is a place name, you will be asked whether it is a Street, Town/city, Island, County/region, Body/course of water, or Celestial body.

If it is a Demonym (e.g. Australian), check the language box if the noun also refers to a language (e.g. Greek).

If your proper noun does not correspond to any of these descriptions, check the Other option.

Adding an acronym or initialism

Antidote asks you to specify whether the acronym or initialism you are adding is a company or organization name (e.g. UN), a thing or concept (e.g. IPO, DNA) or a person (e.g. VIP). If it is a thing, you may wish to specify whether it is uncountable (e.g. DNA) and whether it is a diploma (e.g. Ph.D.). If it is a person, indicate whether it is a profession (e.g. CEO).

  • For forming the plural, see the Inflection section below.

Adding a verb

Antidote displays the inferred infinitive, 3rd person, past tense, and past and present participle forms of the verb for you to edit as necessary.

Inflection

When you enter a noun, a first name, or an initialism or acronym, Antidote will ask you to confirm the suggested singular and plural forms in the Inflection area. For an adjective, you will be given suggested singular, plural, comparative and superlative forms to approve or edit. For example, if you enter dibble as an adjective, the suggested comparative and superlative forms will be more dibble and most dibble; you can change them to dibbler and dibblest if you wish.

Definition

In this area you can add a definition for your new word. For the adjective antidotal, for instance, you could enter “Concerning Antidote”. In fact, you can enter any information, note or comment that you consider relevant to the word or its meaning. If you are writing a novel, you can enter a description for each of your characters. If you are working in sales for a company, you can enter the terms used by the company or include a fact sheet on the parts or items it makes. Then, when you come across these words in your text, you can just open the Dictionary window and display the definition with this information.

“Use this word for correction” option

When this box is unchecked, Antidote will use the new word in its dictionaries, for instance by displaying the definition, but will not use it for correction. For example, you may uncheck this box if you are simply adding a new meaning for a word that Antidote already recognizes. That way you can avoid ambiguities during the correction process.