Rudi Seitz is a software engineer by profession but a logophile at heart, and he’s started a website, Quadrivial Quandary, for fellow word aficionados: “Each day we present four words from our favorite dictionary sites. Your challenge is to use them all in a sentence that illustrates their meanings.” On his Origins page, he expands:
Quandary is a site for logophiles but it is contraindicated for the prim variety. What characterizes this site is exuberance, the joy of using esoteric and sometimes questionable words…
The challenge is intensified by our occasional inclusion of slang words alongside archaic Latinate constructions. How to use words that would never be uttered by the same speaker? … I like to think of each Quandary as rare mix of flammable substances, combusting in the minds of us who behold it, the shared memory connecting us.
If it sounds like your kind of thing, check it out.
Thanks. Registered and submitted. It looks like fun!
nice daily exercise in gene modification
goes with suduko
For extra fun you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the OED word of the day here.
I used to like answers.com a lot, but lately I have become disillusioned with them. Their dictionary was more extensive than most and included links to stuff on the web that wasn’t necessarily in dictionaries. But not too long ago I had several system crashes after accessing their site and removed their search engine from my Firefox search engine window in an attempt to pinpoint the problem. When I finished removing all the spywаre and tried to add the search engine back in, I found it didn’t exist anymore; you have to add an entire “toolbar” which takes up way too much space on a ten-inch netbook screen. They also moved the 30-language translate search tool I used to give my students. I now use the Merriam-Webster search engine–at least it’s reliable.
I sometimes write (when I have time!) on the website http://ficly.com/ where you can write short stories of no more than 1024 characters, write sequels to other people’s stories, and create story-writing competitions for other people to enter and you to judge.
A while ago, I created a competition in which I asked people in the community to submit words, at a rate of no more than one word per person per day, and when the number of characters in all the submitted words, plus one space per word, reached 256, the competition would begin. People were asked to write a story using as many of the submitted words as possible.
I entered a story myself, though obviously it wasn’t eligible to win. Here it is:
http://ficly.com/stories/7712