02/07/08 Looking for the right Word

Looking for that Word. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. I have to admit something. When I was a little tyke I used to read the dictionary. Seriously. I loved reading about words and trying to use different words correctly. Today, I subscribe to several new word of the day web sites and still try to incorporate better words into my vocabulary. So it was interesting for me to find out that agriculture has its very own thesaurus and glossary. Lori Finch is the Thesaurus Coordinator at the National Agriculture Library. FINCH: Librarians like to have a controlled vocabulary that is basically a list of terminology that they can use to assign to items like books and recordings and articles and web pages for subjects. So for example if our scientists produced something about breeding pigs they would look up words in our thesaurus and we would use that to help to describe it so people can find it later. The project is massive and Finch says it takes many people to make it possible. FINCH: You know how it takes a village to raise a child, well it takes a village to raise and thesaurus and glossary because there's not really one person who could know all of the breadth and depth of agriculture. If you think about it, it's a very, very large topic. There are over 69-thousand terms. Finch says you can access the thesaurus and glossary from their web page. FINCH: So to be able to put that on one web page is a bit much and that's why we deliver it up through a searchable database. So if you just put in a word like "protein" and put that in you'll be able to see all the different words we have that include the word protein. You can also download the thesaurus and glossary right on your own computer so it is easily accessible. Finding new words can be a challenge. In some cases there are several words for the same thing and it takes a while to sort those out. Some terminology tends to be short lived and quickly passes from usage. Finch says she sometimes finds new words in the strangest places. FINCH: Just today I was on your aginfo.net and noticed under Vine To Wine a little article that was written by Linda Moran and here what is she doing, she is actually talking about a word. People are interested in very specialized words. It was chaptalization. Which is actually a word that we don't have in our thesaurus and so I'm always looking for interesting words like this. You'll find the word you are looking for at www.nalusda.gov. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.