AROUND HOME : A Dictionary Called JORJ

LET’S SAY, for reasons known best to your therapist, you decide to trade in your fat old tattered college dictionary for a sleek new dictionary on a disc. So you drop by your local weekend computer swap meet or you call your local shareware retailer and ask them to mail you JORJ.

JORJ is a 58,000-word dictionary program with extremely concise definitions ( pencil is defined in its entirety as a “writing instrument”; kite is a “lightweight airborne structure.”)

But most adults won’t be using JORJ for the definitions anyway. Far more useful is its ability to guess what you’re after from the phonetic spelling. Suppose it’s 3 a.m. the night before your term paper is due and to show a little erudition you’d like to at least mention Rousseau. The only thing--you never bought his book and the closest you can come to spelling his name is Ruesew.

With JORJ, that’s good enough. Up pops: “Rousseau, Jean Jacques, French philosopher (1712-1778).”

On further investigation, you will discover that a phonetic “toemain” gets you ptomaine ; “bulyabase” gets bouillabaisse and “sikiatry” gets you psychiatry.

Fun as the phonetic spelling, JORJ’s most useful feature is its mini-database. Suppose you would like to look up some Indian tribes but can’t remember the names, let alone spell them. In this case, just type Indian in JORJ’s scan mode, and it will search the definitions of every word in the database for Indian. The result is some 110 Indian tribes or words with Indian in the definition, including: Choctaw, Kickapoo, Mohican, Nez Perce, Ojibway, Pequot, Pawnee and Shoshoni.

The same experiment with dog gets you 84 words and definitions, including: Afghan, Airedale, Dandie dinmont and Lhasa apso (a small shaggy dog with long straight hair from Tibet).

Entering president gets you a list of presidents, planet gets you a list of planets, and state gives you a list of all 50 states.

A trial copy of JORJ is available for $6 (a two-disc set) from the Software Club; telephone (916) 725-4422. If you like the program and decide to use it, the registration fee (voluntary) is $30.