Recently I wrote, rather hastily, about the huge and bizarre Webster’s Online Dictionary.
Now Andrew Joscelyne at Blogos has looked into this and really done his homework. The dictionary creator, Philip Parker, was born dyslexic and liked to read dictionaries because their entries were short.
bq. So over the past 30 years he has been collecting dictionaries of all kinds. Around the year 2000, large dictionaries on the web started charging for premium words of the sort he needed in his research and that really pissed him off. So he decided to leverage the definitions he had collected from his own store, borrowed the out-of-copyright Webster badge, and started building WOD, which he intends to make the biggest multilingual dictionary site on the web.
More detail at Blogos.