World’s First Dictionary On A Blockchain Goes Live February On OED Anniversary
Introduction
Felix, a partnership between The Immutable and V Systems is about to reach fruition.
Yesterday we announced that the Felix Dictionary, named in the spirit of good luck, will go live on saveaword.com February 1 00:00:01 GMT, one second after Big Ben strikes twelve.
This will commemorate the 138th anniversary of the first publication of the Oxford English Dictionary, the same day in 1884.
We will be sending the editors of the OED an Open Letter in the second week of January, and will politely and directly inform them of our intentions towards making the best dictionary to date, and invite them to join us.
Out of Print
The idea of a dictionary on a blockchain was partly inspired by the decision of the OED in August 2010 [1][2] to abandon the print edition and announce that OED3, the third major revision of the dictionary in 150 years, would only be made available online.
Out of print: The Oxford English Dictionary will now only be available online, spelling the end for the printed version after a 150 year run
Looking forward, not having a print edition of OED3 and other dictionaries raises several concerns:
- black box of operations
- centralised structure
- catastrophic data loss
- opaque history of edits
- possible censorship
Pros and Cons
Many of the above concerns are not relevant to print editions which provide a near immutable record of what words meant in the year of its publication.
However print editions suffer their own set of problems.
They are very expensive to produce and not commercially profitable in their longest editions. OED2 was a ten-volume set of books which weighed as much as a British woman of average size.
Wiktionary fixes many of the concerns outlined above, but Wiktionary is not permanent, immutable, and probably not economically sustainable over a long period of time.
Web 3.0
By using blockchain and NFTs to immortalise Wiktionary definitions, Felix can provide the optimum medium for a dictionary.
Thanks to V Systems, created by Sunny King, it is very affordable requiring the equivalent of less than 20K dollars to pay the transaction fees to save all 850,000 words with their multiple definitions on a blockchain.
The VSYS blockchain has advanced scaling features which make Felix possible. Attempting this on Ethereum or Bitcoin would be far too expensive.
Save a Word
In Felix taking responsibility for your language means exactly that.
We allow people anywhere in the world, without any special permission or KYC, to mint unique NFTs of Wiktionary word definitions using Felix.
We aim to maximise dictionary engagement, incentivise the saving of words, and make an economically sustainable and trustless dictionary.
Specifics
- Saving 1 word and its definitions will cost around 1 VSYS (~2 cents)
- Minting 1 word and its definitions will cost around 3 VSYS (~6 cents)
- Once minted, a word cannot be minted again until its definition is changed
- All Felix NFTs are unique
- All word definitions come from Wiktionary
- You can select the words you want to save, or have Felix randomly select them for you.
- Only DARA and VSYS holders will be able to save and mint words on Felix
- Only DARA holders will be able to mint some NFT for free (see below)
- Cross-chain swaps are coming to VSYS in Q1 2022 and DARA holders will then be able to save and mint natively with DARA tokens.
Free NFT Promotion
DARA holders can mint FELIX NFTs for free as soon as it launches on February 1st.
Any person who holds 1000 or more DARA tokens in MetaMask will be able to save and mint 3 word definitions per minute while the promotion lasts.
DARA tokens never move from MetaMask accounts during the process, and are only used to verify DARA community membership..
Stay Tuned
Please follow Felix Dictionary and The Immutable on Twitter to keep up with the latest news and developments.
Thanks.
The Immutable Team
