Acronym Database A searchable database of acronyms and abbreviations and their expansions. http://www.ucc.ie/info/net/acronyms/index.html Alan Cooper's Homonym List Words, like "caret" and "carrot" that are pronounced the same, but are spelled differently, and that have different meanings. This list was compiled with a true appreciation for "the prime numbers of the English language." http://www.cooper.com/alan/homonym_list.html Amanda's Mnemonics Page A mnemonic is a device, such as a formula or rhyme, used as an aid in remembering. Amanda collects them and has organized them into handy categories. To spell arithmetic correctly remember "A Rat In The House May Eat The Ice Cream." http://www.frii.com/~geomanda/mnemonics.html Ambigram.Com Ambigrams are a word or words that can be read in more than one way or from more than a single vantage point, such as both right side up and upside down. http://Ambigram.Com/ The Anagram Genius Server Did you know that rearranging the letters of "George Bush" gives "He bugs Gore," Madonna Louise Ciccone" gives "Occasional nude income" and "William Shakespeare," "I am a weakish speller"??! With The Anagram Genius you can find out what lurks within the letters of YOUR name, or that of your boss, employer or anything else that you choose." You supply the name or phrase, tone, gender, context, use (or not) of vulgar words, and number of requested responses. Submit this information with your email address and your anagrams arrive promptly in your inbox. http://www.anagramgenius.com/server.html Anagram Hall of Fame Here you'll find a list of the best and the brightest anagrams of all time, such as "The Morse Code = Here Come Dots," "Slot Machines = Cash Lost in'em" and "Dormitory = Dirty Room." http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram/hof.html BABEL: A Glossary of Computer Related Abbreviations and Acronyms This glossary was compiled because the author became frustrated while reading magazine articles, help wanted ads and equipment for sale brochures....all pertaining to computers....where the listed Abbreviations and Acronyms were used and their meanings were either not known or were not immediately available. http://www.oocities.org/ikind_babel/babel/babel.html The Book of Cliches: Phrases to Say in Times of Trouble Cliches for those troubled moments, neatly arranged by category. Includes cliches for: when life is hard, when you are afraid, when you think you are ugly, when you are looking for something and you don't know for what and many more. http://utopia.knoware.nl/users/sybev/cliche/cliche.htm Brain Food: Puzzles For the Brain To Gnaw On Give your mind a work out with devious collection of puzzles. There are hundreds, ranging from word games to logic problems to riddles. Some are tricky. Some require innovation. All require thinking power. Good luck. http://www.rinkworks.com/brainfood/ Brendan's Amazing Anagram Generator This amazing program will take an English name, phrase, and so on, and rearrange the letters to form other English words. Submitting "word play" yielded 48 anagrams, including "yap world," "pal rowdy," and "wary plod." http://mmm.mbhs.edu/~bconnell/anagrams.html Brendan's Phone Anagram Generator This program finds the letter equivalents of a phone number. For example, "439-2665" is equivalent to dialing "HEY-COOL." Most of the results you generate will probably be meaningless, but there might be a couple or so that are real or semi-real phrases. http://mmm.mbhs.edu/~bconnell/phoneagrams.html Broken Rules Page Here you will find some background on the "never end a sentence with a preposition" rule as well as lists of words that violate the "i before e" rule. http://www.ojohaven.com/fun/broken.rules.html Canonical Abbreviations/Acronyms List Some of these will have you ROFLASTC (Rolling On the Floor Laughing And Scaring The Cat). http://www.astro.umd.edu/~marshall/abbrev.html Casey's Snow Day Reverse Dictionary (and Guru) Finally, the remedy for that tip-of-the-tongue feeling. You type in a definition, and Casey's dictionary will tell you which word you are trying to think of. If you aren't sure what to type, try a definition example: a word that is spelled the same backwards as it is forwards Or, to ask the Guru, try: What is the meaning of life? http://www.c3.lanl.gov/revdict/ Chiasmus.com Chiasmus is when you reverse the order of words in two otherwise parallel phrases. Like Mae West's famous line, "It's not the men in my life, it's the life in my men. http://www.chiasmus.com/ Cliche Finder A cliche finder - enter a word into the textbox and the search engine will return any clichés which use that phrase. Over 3,300 cliches indexed. http://www.westegg.com/cliche/ A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia A collection of word facts which includes such oddities as "BEIJING has three dotted letters in a row (in lower case)," and "OCEANIA crams five syllables into only seven letters." http://members.aol.com/gulfhigh2/words.html The Collective Noun Homepage This page as much fun as an exaltation of larks and an ostentation of peacocks. http://www.ojohaven.com/collectives/ Complex Statements for the Simple-Minded A collection of statements that make you ask the musical question "huh?" http://home.earthlink.net/~getwild/jokes/misuses.html Country Western Song Generator http://www.outofservice.com/country/ Crazy English Richard Lederer's wonderful essay in which he reminds us, "Let’s face it: English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant or ham in hamburger, neither apple nor pine in pineapple..." http://www.ojohaven.com/fun/crazy.html Create Your Own Shakespearean Insults Combine one word from each of three columns, preface with "Thou­ and thus shalt thou have the perfect insult. Let thyself go -- mix and match to find a barb worthy of the Bard. ftp://ftp.cirr.com/pub/SCRIBE/Stage/Toinsult.Txt Crypto Cracker Crypto Cracker is a tool for cracking word ciphers, also known as cryptograms or cryptoquotes, a puzzle where one letter in the puzzle is substituted with another. Will also encrypt a phrase. http://www.wordplays.com/crypto.html Daily Arrebus Self-described as a "scrambly-riddly-rebusy-charady-punny kind of word game." http://www.ambigram.com/ Daily Word Search Every day a new interactive word search puzzle with an interesting theme. Choose from 5 different versions that range from easy to difficult http://www.dailywordsearch.com/ Demented Lyrics An archive of lyrics to wacky songs by such artists as "Weird Al" Yankovic, Tom Lehrer, Allan Sherman, and Stan Freberg. http://php.indiana.edu/~jbmorris/lyrics.html eLibs Just like the Madlibs you did as a kid. Read the eLibs that others have come up with or supply your own nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. to create wacky stories. http://www.elibs.com/ Empty Trash Talk "A Mis-users Guide and Litter-It-Tour of computer language for the rest of us. The main purpose of this site is to demystify and unlock the complex, strange sounding, mystical language of computerspeak." http://home.earthlink.net/~emttrashtalk/ English as She is Spoke "This 1883 book is without question the worst phrasebook ever written. The writer, Pedro Carolino, who was Portuguese, did not particularly speak English, nor did he have a Portuguese-English dictionary available. Instead, he worked with a French-English phrasebook and a Portuguese-French dictionary. The results, I'm sure you'll agree, are staggering. " http://www.fragment.com/~ganz/spoke.html English Is Tough Stuff "Multi-national personnel at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters near Paris found English to be an easy language... until they tried to pronounce it. To help them discard an array of accents, these verses were devised. After trying them, a Frenchman said he'd prefer six months at hard labor to reading six lines aloud. Try them yourself. " http://www.unique.cc/ron/estuff.htm English Signs from Around the World Actual signs in English seen 'round the world. A sampling: "Belgrade Hotel Elevator: Please leave your values at the front desk." and "Athens Hotel: Visitors are expected to complain at the office between the hours of 9 and 11 a.m. daily." http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/nagorski/engsigns.htm The Enigma Device A word game where you swap letter pairs in scrambled well-known or humorous quotations until the original message is restored. Great fun! http://wordzap.com/enigma/ English to Pig Latin Translator Enter the text you wish translated in the box and click the translate button. It'sway asway easyway asway atthay! http://www.snowcrest.net/donnelly/piglatin.html Eponyms An eponym is a word derived from someone's name. For example, bloomers are named after Amelia Bloomer. This site presents the author's personal collection of eponyms, collected from books, webpages, teacher worksheets, and brainstorming on his own or with literate friends. http://members.tripod.com/~foxdreamer/index.html Etymologic Calling itself the "toughest word game on the web," in this game you're presented with 10 randomly selected word origin or word definition puzzles to solve. http://www.etymologic.com/ Fake Out! The Definition Guessing Game Choose a level and a word and see if you can guess its definition. http://www.hmco.com/hmco/school/dictionary/ Free Online Word Search Puzzles A large collection of printable word search puzzles arranged in a variety of categories. Most contain a hidden message formed by the letters remaining when the word search is solved. For instance, in the Music category there's a Beatles puzzle. After you find the song titles that have been hidden in the grid, what's left is the first lines of one of the Beatles songs. http://www.free-online-word-search-puzzles.com/ Gallery of "Misused" Quotation Marks You've "seen" them. Maybe on a sign at the "grocery" store, maybe in an ad in your "local" newspaper. They're quotation marks, and they turn up in the strangest of places. Cleverly laid out as a museum, this site features a permanment collection, current exhibits and a donation rotunda. Wander through the "rooms" and marvel at this collection of misused quotation marks. http://www.juvalamu.com/qmarks/ German Words in English List of German words that have found their way into the English language. http://www.daube.ch/opinions/sprache06.html Goonerisms Spalore (Spoonerisms Galore) He's been proudly "meducating the asses since 1997." Check out this page dedicated to the listing of assorted, random & fun spoonerisms. http://www.matthewgoldman.com/spoon/ Gourmet World -- Cooking Glossaries Gourmet World presents links to more than twenty specialized glossaries for cooking terms. Included are glossaries for cheesemaking, sushi, Italian cooking, wine tasting, and spices, herbs and seasonings. http://www.gourmetworld.com/library/gw000645.htm Greek and Latin Roots Vocabulary help is here! This site helps you decode Greek and Latin bases, prefixes and suffixes. http://www.kent.k12.wa.us/KSD/MA/resources/greek_and_latin_roots/transition.html The Heteronym Homepage Heteronyms are words that are spelled identically but have different meanings when pronounced differently. For example: Lead, pronounced LEED, means to guide. However, lead, pronounced LED, means a metallic element. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~cellis/heteronym.html Homographs Homographs are words that have identical spellings but different pronunciations and different meanings. http://www.marlodge.supanet.com/wordlist/homogrph.html Horn Tooting Adjectives Long list of adjectives to use to describe yourself on a resume. http://www.umassd.edu/careerserv/horntoot.html#verbs Horsename-O-Matic Create magnificent names for all kinds of horses - equestrian, trotting, galloping by just pushing the button. http://home.c2i.net/bjarteas/english.html How To Write Your Name in Mayan Glyphs This page will lead you on a guided tour in steps to show you how you can put together your own name glyph, and finishes with an example. http://www.halfmoon.org/names.html Instant Online Crossword Puzzle Maker Customize a puzzle to meet your needs. You supply the words, the clues and a title. Great fun! http://www.varietygames.com/CW/ InvestorWords "The biggest, best investing glossary on the Web" with over 6,000 investing terms and 20,000 links between related words. http://www.investorwords.com/ John's Word Search Puzzles http://www.thepotters.com/puzzles.html Jumble and Crossword Solver You enter scrambled letters and it returns the unscrambled word. It also lets you enter words with letters missing and it tells you all the words that fit the pattern. http://ull.chemistry.uakron.edu/jumble.html Language Games.org Solve word search puzzles, crossword puzzles and play hangman in English, Spanish, French, German and Italian. Great way to have fun while learning a language. http://www.languagegames.org/la/ Linguistic Olympics At the Linguistic Olympics secondary students compete by solving puzzles in languages they have never learned. This site contains sample puzzles from past US Linguistic Olympics competitions. [New URL] http://www.lingolym.org/ Linguistic Phenomena/Devices This is a list of some of the lesser-known linguistic phenomena and devices used in English writing. You actually know what most of these are, you just didn't know what they were called. http://www.csi.uottawa.ca/~kbarker/ling-devices.html Mag's Word Finder Ever wondered how many words you could make out of the letters in your name? or "Merry Christmas?" or ... ? This is the place to find out. Choose a dictionary, type in a word or phrase, and fire away! http://magswordfinder.com/ Malapropisms Named after the character Miss Malaprop in Sheridan's comedy The Rivals, a malapropism is any well-intended saying that takes on a different and often ludicrous meaning when a similar yet utterly inappropriate word is used. To wit: "He is the very pineapple of politeness." http://www.nidlink.com/~dgookin/malaprop.htm The Monthly Idiom Every month the Comenius Group provides a new idiom to assist students of English. They provide a definition as well as audio files of the idiom itself and the idiom used in context. In other words, they bend over backward to help. http://www.comenius.com/idioms/ Once Upon a Palindrome A story and a word game in one. You come up with a palindrome that logically finishes each section. http://members.cox.net/jjschnebel/palin.html Online Crosswords If you like to solve and/or construct crossword puzzles and would like to try one online or generate puzzles for your own homepage, this is the site for you. Puzzles come in three flavors: standard, party and image versions. http://www.clearlight.com/~vivi/xw/index.html Online Hieroglyphics Translator Enter text and have it translated into hieroglyphics. http://www.quizland.com/hiero.htm Oxymorons A collection of phrases like "jumbo shrimp" and "small crowd" which in their pairing create irony. http://www.specsci.com/donspage/htmldocs/oxymoron.htm The Periodic Table of Poetry Chemistry and poetry together as never before. Click on your favorite element for a poem. http://www.superdeluxe.com/elemental/ Phobia List It's enough to give you hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia (fear of long words). Now featuring a reverse phobia list where you can look things up the thing feared. http://phobialist.com/ PhoneSpell Enter a 6 to 10 digit phone number and find out what words and phrases your phone number spells. http://www.phoneSpell.org/phoneSpell.html Phonetic Alphabets (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta...) There is a widely known alphabet Alpha Bravo ... Yankee Zulu. Such alphabets are variously known as phonetic/radio/spelling/telephone alphabets, and the term analogy alphabet is also used. This is a collection such alphabets from a variety of languages. http://www.columbia.edu/~fuat/cuarc/phonetic.html Phrase Finder Browse or search this phrase thesaurus. Includes meanings and/or derivations. http://www.shu.ac.uk/web-admin/phrases/go.html The Pig Latin Converter The Pig Latin Converter will take any web page and convert all the text into Pig Latin. Any link you follow off of a converted page will get converted itself, so you can view the whole Web in Pig Latin! Aboutyay imetay! http://www.angelfire.com/nv/spy4652452/pig.html Puns Galore This attractive, easy-to-navigate site includes puns of the day, puns you can browse by category (such as shaggy dog, one-liners, groaners, and spoonerisms) or search for in a number of ways. http://www.punsgalore.com/index.html Puzzlemaker A site that lets you create customized puzzles. Includes word search, criss-cross, cryptograms, fallen phrases and much more. http://puzzlemaker.school.discovery.com/ Quis vocaris? Your Name in Latin To find your name in Latin, enter your first name, last name, and the country (US, Canada, Mexico), state or major city where you live. http://www.latin.org/english/name-lookup.html Rap Dictionary This one is for serious rappers. Parental advisory included. http://www.rapdict.org/dictionary_0.html Rhetorical Figures From alliteration to zeugma, and everything in between, all the figures of speech are here. http://www.uky.edu/ArtsSciences/Classics/rhetoric.html Richard Lederer's Verbivore Page The web site woven for wordaholics, logolepts, and verbivores where we are reminded that "ours is the only language in which you drive in a parkway and park in a driveway and night falls but never breaks and day breaks but never falls." http://www.pobox.com/~verbivore Rosie's Ringers Rosie presents lots of those picture word puzzle I love. She even includes a section to practice on if this type of puzzle is new to you. Great graphics, too! http://www.rozies.com/Zzzz/Ringers/R-index.html Sarangworld Word Morphing Word morphing is changing one word into another by changing one letter at a time with each change resulting in a valid word. You enter a target and a source word, click the Morph Words button and see if morphing is possible. http://www.sarangworld.com/WORDMORPH/ Sayings and Everyday Expressions Discover the meanings and origins of popular sayings. http://oocities.com/PicketFence/7608/index.html Scott Pakin's Automatic Complaint Letter Generator You supply basic information regarding the person you wish to complain about and the number of paragraphs the complaint is to contain. Then push the complain button. Amazingly satisfying! http://www-csag.ucsd.edu/individual/pakin/complaint Scrabble Helper Helps you figure out how to best use those tiles in your Scrabble rack. http://bgp547740bgs.ewndsr01.nj.comcast.net/fcgi-bin/scrabble.pl Signs International Signs and notices written in English that were discovered throughout the world. Seen in a Swiss mountain inn. "Special today - no ice cream." http://www-smi.stanford.edu/people/felciano/humor/signs.html Silva Rhetorica: The Forest of Rhetoric Using the metaphor of a forest as a guide to navigation, this site an online reference and primer to the terms of classical and renaissance rhetoric, with over 800 terms defined with examples and references. http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm Sniglets A collection of sniglets -- words that don't appear in the dictionary, but should -- arranged conveniently by category. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/maddog/stuff/sniglets.html Slanguage.com: The Hick-to-Hip Translation Guide Choose a city and learn to talk like the locals. http://www.slanguage.com/ Sounds of the World's Animals "Animals make much the same sounds around the world, but each language expresses them differently. English and French cows sound the same, but not in English and French! Explore the sounds of the world's languages through the sounds of the world's animals." http://www.georgetown.edu/cball/animals/animals.html Spelling Test An interactive spelling test which features fifty commonly misspelled words. Take the test and see how you score. At the bottom of the page are tips for how to improve your spelling. http://www.sentex.net/~mmcadams/spelling.html STANDS4.com Decode acronyms and abbreviations used in any of a huge variety of categories. http://www.stands4.com/ Taglines Galore! Featuring over 439,000 taglines. Not a blurb in the bunch. http://www.taglinesgalore.com/ The Testudine and the Leporine A collection of those ine words that turn animals into adjectives. You know, like dog=canine, cat=feline, and tortoise=testudine. http://www.m-w.com/mw/textonly/lighter/cool/testudin.htm Tom Swifties Excruciating adverbial puns some collected, some created, by Michael Curl as part of his "thinks.com" site. http://thinks.com/words/tomswift.htm Tongue Twister Database This page was originally created to give a good group of tongue twisters to people in speech therapy, to people who want to work on getting rid of an accent, or to people who just plain like tongue twisters. Enjoy! http://www.oocities.org/Athens/8136/tonguetwisters.html Twists, Slugs and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang With the help of this glossary you too can talk like Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, and Mike Hammer. http://www.vex.net/~buff/slang.html Valley URL Nostalgic for the 80's? Here's a site that will translate the Web site of your choice into, like, valleyspeak. Oh, my gawd! http://www.80s.com/Entertainment/ValleyURL/ Vanity License Plates A site honoring how creative people can be when they're limited to expressing themselves to 6 or 8 characters. Links here include help if you need to brush up on license plate basics and a retelling of the story of Oedipus the King told entirely with vanity plates, called Oedipus the King (Of the Road). http://www-chaos.umd.edu/misc/origplates.html VoyCabulary VoyCabulary transforms any webpage into links to dictionary or thesaurus lookups. Enter the URL to your favorite website or type in a sentence. Once you're at the page, click on any word to look it up in the dictionary of your choice. http://www.voycabulary.com/ Wacky World of Words If you love word games, you'll love this page. Try your hand at such games as "Compound Clues," "Numbletters," "Alpha-Spells," and "Rhyming Buddies." Great fun! http://www3.bc.sympatico.ca/teachwell/ Word Finder When you know some or all of the letters that have to be in a word, but you don't know the exact order of those letters in the word, Word Finder can help. It's great to help solve anagrams and crossword puzzles and to cheat at Scrabble. http://www.vainokodas.com/wordplay/findword.html Word Frequency Indexer Create a frequency index, or 'word list', of any text. Just paste or type in your text and select the sort order you'd like. http://www.georgetown.edu/cball/webtools/web_freqs.html Word Jumbles Helps you unscramble words with up to 25 characters. http://bgp547740bgs.ewndsr01.nj.comcast.net/fcgi-bin/jumble.pl?option=jumble Word Morphs You enter a word and the computer will come up with a list of words differing from the original word by one letter. http://bgp547740bgs.ewndsr01.nj.comcast.net/fcgi-bin/offbyone.pl Word Slide Applet Remember those puzzle games you had as a kid, where you slid letter tiles around in a square to form words? Here's an online version to try. http://www.clearlight.com/~vivi/xw/slide.html A Word With You A daily column on word or phrase origins with a fun interactive hangman-like game called Dunceinstein. http://www.accessone.com/~lparos/ The Word Wizard This site takes you on a round trip across the language, answering your questions, offering a selection of new words, snappy quotes and elegant insults, not to mention amazing competitions, Public Scribe Service, Fancy Word Parties and the Lexicographer's Club. http://wordwizard.com/ Wordles: Home of Word Fun, Word Games, Word Puzzles and Word Play! "If you're one of those folks who can't resist turning words inside out, trying them backwards, or transposing them in your mind, then you'll enjoy Wordles." Cryptograms, word search, word in a word, links, and more. http://www.wordles.com/ Wordly Wise WordGames An unusual and challenging collection of great word games. http://www.hoadworks.com/gamemenu.htm Wordplays Play against the clock to test your word knowledge with the interactive active games Boggle and Crossword Challenge. The site also features an interactive mostly English dictionary and seven interactive tools to help you solve word puzzles. http://www.wordplays.com/ Words & Stuff Jed Hartman's weekly column on words and wordplay. http://kith.org/logos/words/words.html Words Commonly Confused This site has groups of words commonly confused and some info to help figure out when to use which one. http://homepage.smc.edu/reading_lab/words_commonly_confused.htm Words Ending with -GRY For me, the definitive page on the riddle that never seems to die, "There are three words in the English language that end with "gry." One is hungry and the other is angry. What is the third word?" http://www.tempe.gov/library/netsites/gry.htm Words in a Word Helps you solve those "How many words can you find in a word?" puzzles. You put in your starting word, indicate the minimum number of letters a word can have, and the computer will do the rest. http://bgp547740bgs.ewndsr01.nj.comcast.net/fcgi-bin/jumble.pl World Wide Words World Wide Words takes a regular sideways glance at the English language, what makes it special and how it has got the way it is. This site features "Articles on Aspects of English," "Turns of Phrase," "The Word Hoard," and "Usage Notes." http://www.worldwidewords.org/ Your Dictionary.com Here you'll find on-line dictionaries for over 280 languages, glossaries for over 50 areas, grammar resources and loads more. http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/rbeard/diction.html