Online English Learners' Dictionaries and Misspellings: One Year On

A previous study (Lew and Mitton 2011) found that the leading monolingual English learners’ dictionaries in their online versions coped poorly with misspelled words as search terms. This paper reports on a repeat of this study in 2012, which obtained similar results, though some changes from 2011 are noted. As in 2011, the performance of the dictionaries was compared with that of an experimental context-free spellchecker, and again the online dictionaries were found wanting. The new data were also subjected to a cluster analysis which showed how the dictionaries could be grouped based solely on their performance.