Divii: A searchable video dictionary

A really useful tool for students to see vocabulary in context is the corpus. One of the difficulties of corpus results as well as dictionaries is explaining something that is very visual in nature such as movement. Also, since it is text based, you are unable to hear the pronunciation as well as any nuances to the language such as stress. An interesting online tool that searches transcripts from videos in a semi-corpus way is Divii. It is free and doesn’t require registration to use. Here is how it is works:

• Go to divii.org and type a search term in the search box. You can type in a single word or a phrase. Click on the search button or hit the ‘Enter’ key.

• You will be taken to your search results with a thumbnail of the video on the left and the text from a section of that video with the word or phrase in it. Click on the video you would like to watch and it will start to play, showing the captions below the video.

• By default, the video will be in loop mode, which means it will repeat a small section of the video until you stop it. You can take it out of loop mode by pressing on the Loop button. The video will now continue to play until you stop it.

As you can see, it is fairly easy to use. Divii has done a lot of work to filter out questionable videos, but there is always the chance that something could come up that might be a problem for kids. There isn’t anything there that would persuade me away from using it altogether, but it is something to consider before using in class.