Dick Brass (born 1951) is a technology investor and executive, and a former newspaper reporter and editor. After a journalism career as a reporter and then editor at the New York Daily News, as well as restaurant critic for Playboy Magazine and WNBC-TV, Brass entered the technology field. In the late 1970s, Brass developed the first dictionary-based spelling checker and invented the electronic thesaurus. He founded Dictronics Publishing Inc, which acquired the exclusive rights to many of the world's most important reference works, including The Random House Dictionary and Roget's Thesaurus. Dictronics was sold to Wang Laboratories in 1983. In 1987, Brass joined Oracle Corporation as a vice president and served as president of one of its subsidiaries. He was involved in a [proposed] tie-up