Free Online Dictionaries

For information regarding the scope of this column, consult the headnote in the September 2008 issue (p. 136 of this volume). The dates of access for each review of an online source indicate the dates during which the reviewer was evaluating the resource. All Web sites were last accessed to verify availability on 18 February 2009.

Free Online Dictionaries

In the age of electronic publishing, many of us have become accustomed to immediate access from anywhere, via computer networks, to authoritative, scholarly resources such as Grove Music Online ( http://oxfordmusiconline.com ) and the Harvard Dictionary of Music (4th ed., 2003 [ http://corp.credoreference.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=121&xrvolid=292 ]). For most of us, our institutions provide this access, it costs us nothing, and we seldom need to think about availability. But what of the researcher or music-lover who is not affiliated with a library that subscribes to such resources? Or what if we are away from home, and access to the scholarly resources for which our institutions pay so much is not available? Thankfully, there is help in such instances, in the form of music dictionaries available for free on the World Wide Web. As one might expect, these resources vary widely in terms of scope, quality, and functionality. This review will evaluate five such sources, concentrating on what might be called terminological dictionaries rather than encyclopedic or biographical sources.

Dolmetsch Online Music Dictionary. Dolmetsch Musical Instruments. http://www.dolmetsch.com/musictheorydefs.htm (Accessed May-December 2008). [Requires a Web browser and an Internet connection. Sound and video adjuncts may require a media player.]

The largest of the sources reviewed here, the Dolmetsch Online Music Dictionary (DOMD) defines thousands of terms. Indeed, the number of entries under the letter A alone exceeds one thousand. This large number is accounted for, in part, by the fact that the dictionary does not con-fine itself to the field of music. In addition to specifically musical terms, it defines general words that might appear in printed scores or in writings about music. In French, German, Italian, and Spanish, the selection of words is asserted to be equivalent to “any good pocket dictionary” (Introduction). Specialist terms are also taken from a broad range of related fields, including dance, linguistics, drama, and poetry, to name but a few. The editors intend the dictionary to enable readers to define or translate most terms that they might come across while performing or studying music in major Western languages, and the dictionary seems quite successful in this goal.

Although no editors of the dictionary are named on the site, overall responsibility for it seems to lie with Dolmetsch Musical Instruments, the British firm founded by Arnold Dolmetsch. The dictionary is one of several free resources provided by the Dolmetsch organization. These range from a dictionary of composers (with very brief entries) to fingering charts for the recorder, and ebooks. The editors are careful to lay out the scope and purpose of the dictionary, as noted above. They also explicate their practice regarding names and abbreviations, exhibiting more attention to such details than most similar sources. Perhaps most helpfully, they provide a section of acknowledgments, consisting largely of links (complete with copyright dates and authors) to other online sources that supplement DOMD’s coverage. In some instances, these sites are also the source of DOMD’s own definitions. These are often documented more specifically within the entry by a link pointing to the site from which material was taken.

The definitions in DOMD vary quite a bit in terms of length and depth, and because of the derivative nature of many of them, they lack the consistency of approach one might find in a dictionary assembled from whole-cloth. Still, they are generally quite good—concise, yet often multi-faceted, defining a term in several different ways when appropriate. As an example, the definition of “Mode” incorporates the broad concept of a sequence of notes; the more specific meaning as it applies to early Western music; and a brief definition of rhythmic modes. This is supplemented by an illustration (in scale form) of each of...