New and Unusual

Words rule around here. Let’s focus on TW who plays with words all of the time. And, of course she reads 3xs more than anyone else in the house and is always stumbling upon a weird word and asking “have you ever seen this word in a book before”? And off we go discussing the word, its origin and its potential meaning - before we head for an online dictionary to find out the real answers.

I cannot tell you how many times we’ve used an online dictionary or one of those handheld readers dictionaries only to come up empty. I think the Allwords.com dictionary is the answer to that problem. It allows four search result types and it seems to bring back more “slang” type results than other online dictionaries. I’m sure we’ll put it to the test shortly.

This would be a good resource for kids, too. All of the times a kid asks what a word means or how to spell a word - well Allwords lets you type in part of a word and sort results by “starts with” or “ends with”. That’s a nice feature when you can’t remember the exact word you’re looking for or your don’t know how to spell it.

The other thing I like about Allwords is the ability to surf the dictionary. That’s more important than the search engine, if you ask me. There’s nothing better than randomly surfing words. The links for word lovers section isn’t bad either.

Happy Word Surfing!