Tag: VOCABULARY

If you play Scrabble (or a scrabble-like game) from time to time, you may want to check out Scrabble Helper. This simple website is a godsend when you're at a loss for words. Simply enter whatever letters you have, and the word you'd like to connect with. Scrabble helper comes up with a whole bunch of suggestions sorted by score. The site lets you select one of five dictionaries – ...

Word Bubbles is a Flash game that's somewhat similar to Amazon's Every Word for the Kindle. You get three initial letters ("tru" in the screenshot above), and you need to compose as many English words as possible with those three letters. When you create a six-letter word, the bubble that says "6" rises closer to the surface. When you find another six-letter word, it rises some more. When you've ...

I love learning new words. However, when I just read what a word means, more often than not I soon forget the definition. If I use the word in a number of sentences, though, it's easier for me to retain it – especially if the sentences are meaningful. Phrays is a nifty little Web application built on this exact principle. You're supposed to go there once a day and check out the word of the ...

Everyone knows what a mushroom looks like. But what do you call those fin-looking parts under the cap? You know, those thin, membrane-like things? That's the type of question you can't really use a regular dictionary for. You might get lucky with Wikipedia, but in this particular case, you won't. The Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary helps you answer questions like these. It's a large visual ...

Quick, I need an eight-letter word that starts with B, and letter six is R! Any ideas? If questions like this make you draw a blank, Word Domination can come in very handy the next time you're struggling with those last few words of a crossword puzzle. It gave me 97 different results for this particular query, including "bescorch" and "bevatron." I wasn't really sure what a bevatron was, so I ...

RobinWords is a simple, non-Flash game. It starts you off with one four-letter word (in the screenshot, the game picked "mist"). You then need to come up with another valid four-letter word by changing just one of the letters in the word that the computer provided. You can't shuffle the sequence, either. So, in this case, I changed "mist" to "gist." Then, it's the computer's turn, and it has to ...

Everyone knows you can use Google as a way of correcting your bad spelling. Just put in a word that you're not sure about, and it will give you the familiar "Did you mean?" result. There's no need to be embarrassed, just click through and find what you meant to search for. Well, now Google's going one step further with improved spelling correction. If it's absolutely sure you've botched the ...

Some linguists say that most of the time people speaking any language only use about 1000 words. If you believe that, then you might also think that if you learned those 1000 common words, you would have a basic degree of fluency. If the idea of rote memorization and vocabulary building in this manner strikes your fancy, LearnItLists is there to help. LearnItLists is essentially a web gadget that ...

This summer, Google was both blessed and cursed with becoming a verb in the Oxford and Merriam-Webster english dictionaries. When it happened, Google thumped the trademark drum pretty hard, reminding people that "Sure, I'll google that" is fine when in reference to using their search engine, while "Oh! I googled that on Yahoo! and couldn't believe what I found!" will land you on their naughty ...