Knowledge is free,and meant to be

On a lark,I decided to find the meaning of the word serendipity,the meaning of which I already knew,in the Dictionary incorporated into OpenOffice.org.OpenOffice Dictionary got me the meaning if serendipity from Wordnet along with a humongous number of synonyms from Moby’s thesaurus whereupon I came across an unfamiliar word,trouvaille.Since some of the synonyms didn’t seem properly analogous to serendipity to me,I tried to find trouvaille in OO.o Dictionary.Zilch results.

I fired up Firefox and called in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary where I was told it would be found in the unabridged version,which is another method of saying,”You gotta pay for this”.

I wasn’t going to sit around for that,so I Googled “define: trouvaille” and the 1st result is from the French Wiktionary,sister project to Wikipedia.Now,I’m no French expert,but a cursory glance at the page via the magnifying glass of Google Translate gave me enough to understand that trouvaille is indeed a synonym of serendipity.

All this talk for one moral of the story:On the Internet,there’s indeed no way to hide knowledge.