We've toiled and we've troubled, and finally our hard work has paid off: the term "DVR" has been accepted by Merriam-Webster in its Eleventh Edition Collegiate Dictionary. Strangely, DVR joins the dictionary at the same time as RPG (or rocket propelled grenade): we're guessing the staff at Merriam-Webster switched over from their TiVo for a bit of Gears action, reminding them that RPG needed to be in there too.

Remember the good 'ol days when that hundred-pound slab of text was the only way to beef up your vocabulary? Merriam Webster, a well-defined name in the business, has stuffed over 300,000 definitions and 500,000 synonyms onto a 256MB USB drive (with a couple hundred megs to spare, we understand). Aside from having the entire dictionary and thesaurus at your disposal, it comes with a few other tools to help proof your masterpiece: phonetic spell correction, a grammar guide, confusable function alerts -- a feature that alerts the user if there's a potential mix-up in similar sounding words -- and even a crossword puzzle solver to show that newspaper who's boss. All things we could probably use around here at Engadget HQ, we know, we know. So if your word processor's checking functions have failed you once too many, or you simply find comfort in always having the right words to say, the $49 drive could prove quite meaningful.

[Via Popgadget]