Tag: WORDS

This week's series of tips will be focusing on handy little features for Microsoft Excel and Word. To see the previous tips, check our Tips index. The new Ribbon interface on Office 2007 and 2010 is quite fancy, and once you get used to it, it's a lot of fun to use. One of its few downsides is that it's tall – far taller than a "traditional" menu. If you're working on a netbook or are ...

Google, in association with a couple of boffins from Harvard University, has just released an awesome tool that should entertain you for at least 10 minutes, and possibly more. It lets you compare words, or phrases, from a corpus totaling 500 billion words from 5.2 million books -- in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian and Spanish. The potential applications for such a tool are ...

It sometimes happens that a certain word eludes me. I know it exists, I even know what it sounds like or how it begins or ends -- but for the life of me, I can't recall what the exact word is. For situations like these, Tip of My Tongue can come in very handy. To find the word "download," I only had to tell it that it starts and ends with D, has W somewhere in the middle, and means ...

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 ...

Google has had a "dictionary lookup" feature for a while now -- all you had to do was slap define: before your search term. But they've now made it better, and mostly, made it easier for people to find it: Just search for a "difficult" word, and a definition would pop up as the first result, with quick links to some dictionaries. What's interesting is that you don't get an instant definition for ...

Quick! What's an eight-letter word that starts with R, ends with M, and has B somewhere in it?* I know that these are often life-or-death questions, especially if Scrabble is involved (or poetry, for that matter). It's a good thing we're in the 21st century and there are now handy tools like Word Finder. This handy little form, hidden away in, of all places, the Toolbox section of a photography ...

Joining 'unfriend' (the Word of 2009), 'Google' has just been dubbed the Word of the Decade by the American Dialect Society. It's probably the first time you've ever heard of the American Dialect Society (founded in 1889!), and almost certainly the last... until 2020! There was also voting for a variety of other categories (PDF): tweet was voted their word of 2009 (even though the Oxford ...

Did you even know that there was a New Oxford American Dictionary? I didn't. But with their recent addition of 'unfriend' to the American language, that might soon change. Maybe this was their way of leaving the realm of obscurity... and into hilarity! "It has both currency and potential longevity," says Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary program. She goes on to ...

Wordnik is a bit like a dictionary, in the sense that it collects words and their definitions, but it aspires to be more than that. Users contribute example sentences, audio pronunciations, images from Flickr and more, so you can really get a good idea of how and when a word is used. There's also a thesaurus-plus "related words" feature, which shows not only synonyms and antonyms, but other ...

Rhyming dictionaries are great, not only because they help us finish off our salty poems, but also because they introduce us to spiffy new words like "Mashantucket." WriteRhymes is a handy little resource for any aspiring poet - or anyone who like to annoy their co-workers by needlessly speaking in rhymes. Type some text in the box, alt + click a word, and suggested rhymes appear in a balloon. ...

Most word processors will give you some basic statistics about documents you're working on, like a word count. But what if you want to see how many words, paragraphcs, sentences, characters, and spaces are in a text-based document without opening it up in a word processor? Text Stat is a lightweight, open source Windows application that will let you analyze any TXT or HTML file. In addition to ...

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Bacn_the_new_web_2_0_term'; This one's hot off the presses, so we're still deciding on the lame factor. It seems we have a new term in Web 2.0 land, 'bacn'. Brought to light at the recent Pittsburgh Podcamp event, the term is being described as "notifications you want, just not right now." It is in regards to all the special email newsletters and ...

If you are just getting into the whole Search Engine Optimization world, or want to learn a bit about some common phrases that are spoken when it comes to designing websites that speak to Search Engines, we have a guide for you! This alphabetical guide put together by an SEOmoz visitor lists out each optimization term with descriptions of search terms from 301, affiliate, click fraud, doorway ...

Oh my gosh! I looooove wordie. I love it, because I love words. This site lets you make lists of words easily, play with words, and even break out an RSS feed or two of your words for daily consumption at your leisure. You know how everyone says "use your words" in corporate-speak when they really mean to call you stupid in every day language? Well, Wordie lets you not only "use your freakin ...