MetaFilter posts tagged with words

From the original Greek, meaning 'I like big donuts'

blue_beetle — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 16:36:59 -0800

A Brief History of English, with Chronology by Suzanne Kemmer is one of many articles at Words in English, a website designed as "a resource for those who want to learn more about this fascinating language – its history as a language, the origins of its words, and its current modern characteristics."

Fan-diddly-damn-tastic!

strangeguitars — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 08:56:03 -0800

Fan-diddly-damn-tastic! The whirly-twirly-leapy-flippy world of nonce words. When something is crappy, do you ever yearn for synonyms such as crapitudinous, crapfestacular, and craposcopic? (via ADS-L)

"Telescopic Text"

dobbs — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 09:30:30 -0800

I made tea. {Flash, I think. Via notcot.}

Two effect they're effluent capitol.

blue_beetle — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:29:53 -0800

Confusing Words is a collection of 3210 words that are troublesome to readers and writers. Words are grouped according to the way they are most often confused or misused.

the is and it are you of

clearly — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 01:42:15 -0800

The 100 Most Common Words In The English Language

see how many you can guess in 5 minutes

silver, orange, purple, month

blue_beetle — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 08:27:26 -0800

Write Rhymes : As you write, hold the alt key and click on a word to find a rhyme for it...

Wordchamp: hover over a foreign-language word and get its definition

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:42:30 -0800

Wordchamp lets you view foreign-language web pages with definitions in your language as mouseovers (registration-only). When you've registered, you can enter a language pair and a URL into Wordchamp's "Web Reader" and a definition will pop up when you hover over a word. It's sad that it's registration-only, and I can't vouch for the quality of the dictionaries; but I've found it quite useful in making some sense of web pages in different languages.

Capitol Words - US Congress In A Word A Day

Effigy2000 — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 20:55:19 -0800

Capitol Words allows you to see what the most often used word was on any given day in the U.S Congress. [via mefi projects]

The Apostrophe Engine

Fizz — Wed, 28 May 2008 21:29:42 -0800

A poem that builds upon itself and grows as the world wide web grows. The Apostrophe Engine is a website operated by Bill Kenney and Darren Wershler-Henry. It is the source of the poems in apostrophe, a book published by ECW Press in 2006. The home page of the Apostrophe Engine site presents the full text of a poem called "apostrophe", written by Bill in 1993. In this digital version of the poem, each line is now a hyperlink. How it works. When a reader/writer clicks on a line, it is submitted to a search engine, which then returns a list of Web pages, as in any search. The Apostrophe Engine then spawns five virtual robots that work their way through the list, collecting phrases beginning with “you are” and ending in a period. The robots stop after collecting a set number of phrases or working through a limited number of pages, whichever happens ﬁrst. Next, the Apostrophe Engine records and spruces up the phrases that the robots have collected, stripping away most HTML tags and other anomalies, then compiles the results and presents them as a new poem, with the original line as its title ... and each new line as another hyperlink. At any given time, the online version of “apostrophe” is potentially as large as the Web itself. The reader/writer can continue to burrow further into the poem by clicking any line on any page, sliding metonymically through the ever-changing contents. Moreover, because the contents of the Web is always changing, so is the contents of the poem. The page it returns today will not be the page that it returns next week, next month, or next year.

Got a stiff neck while playing...

StrikeTheViol — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:38:04 -0800

Monday Flash Fun: Alpha Assault