Professor Robert Beard founded The Web of Online Dictionaries (WOD), one of the World Wide Web's first global language resources, in the fall of 1995. On his retirement from Bucknell University in 2000, he and a former student, Paul JJ Payack converted the site into yourDictionary.com, the world's first linguistic company. yourDictionary has expanded the resources on WOD and also offers an enterprise-level translation service, a brand-naming service, and a lexical database service to customers like Volvo, General Motors, and Tyndale House Publishers. The site traffic has increased from 650,000 page views per day in 1999 to 8,000,000 today, about 1.5 million visitors.
The awards to WOD from Yahoo Internet Magazine, The New Yorker, the BBC, The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Forbes Magazine, and Britannica.com, among many others have continued with the launch of the commercial site. The site is featured regularly on CNN and its "Top 10 Words of 200X" have been featured there, on ABC, CBS and in various media around the world. Payack and Beard are regularly cited in articles on language in newspaper such as the LA Times, NY Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, London Mail, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, Hindustani Times, among others.
Beard held the Ruth Everett Sierzega Chair in Linguistics at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA. until his retirement. He is the author of three books, The Indo-European Lexicon, Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology: A General Theory of Inflection and Word Formation, and Bibliography of Morphology, and scores of papers and articles on theoretical and applied linguistics that have appeared in all the leading linguistic journals. He has lectured in many universities in the United States, Holland, Russia, Belarus, and Thailand.
Beard has received numerous grants and awards, including several Fulbright Research Grants, the AATSEEL Award of Merit (North American Russian Teacher of the Year) and the Best Slavic Website award. He is a member of Linguistic Society of America, American Council of Teachers of Russian, Linguistic Society of America, and Dictionary Society of North America.
Beard received his PhD in Slavic languages and MA in Russian from the University of Michigan and his BA in English from the University of North Carolina. In his 35-year teaching career at Bucknell, he taught Russian, Russian culture, Russian history, and linguistics (with an emphasis on syntax, lexicology, and morphology). simulation gamesword gamesmahjongtime management gamesdownloadable pc gameskids gamespuzzle gameshidden objects games
