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TopClicks
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Curiosities, Wonders & Interesting Facts
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Words & Languages
A.Word.A.Day - Do you love words? Then you'll want to get on the A Word a Day (AWAD) mailing list. It's free! Each day you'll get a new word, definition, and brief quote showing how the word is used. Net-mom's on the AWAD list, along with 200,000 other people! The home page has sample words from today and yesterday, or you can look through the archives to see what the list is like.
Braille: History, Use, and Current Research - Imagine if you could read words by the way they feel to your touch. That's one of the ways blind people read, by feeling the little bumps, which represent letters. This is Braille, and you can learn about it at this page. There are also sources for fonts, equipment, and even music in Braille.
Common Errors in English - Plenty of people use common words and phrases the wrong way, and this page aims to set them all straight. Learn when to use "its" and when to rely on "it's." Discover why being "very unique" is impossible. Is it "loose" or "lose"? "Immigrate" or "emigrate"? Could you "care less"? Find out here.
Domenic and Josh's World of Shakespeare - Did Shakespeare really write all those plays? Or was it someone else--or maybe several someone elses! Learn about the controversy here as you explore this most interesting site. Did you know many of our everyday expressions come from Shakespeare's plays? Read about some of them here. The real fun is in the Games section, where you play Hamlet or experiment with online magnetic poetry. This site was created by students for the ThinkQuest competition.
Esperanto: Multilingual Information Center - Esperanto is a fairly new language as these things go: it's been around 100 years or so. It is no one's native language. Rather, it's an attempt to have a common world language many people can easily learn to speak. According to the information at this resource, "About 75 percent of Esperanto's vocabulary comes from Romance languages (especially Latin and French), about 20 percent comes from Germanic languages (German and English), and the rest comes mainly from Slavic languages (Russian and Polish) and Greek (mostly scientific terms)." In Esperanto, every word is pronounced exactly as it is spelled. There are no "silent" letters or exceptions. This makes Esperanto one of the easiest languages to learn quickly, according to experts. Here is how to say "I love you" in Esperanto: Mi amas vin . Try it on your mom.
Glossary of Poetic Terms from Bob's Byway - Your teacher has assigned a poetry project that's just gone from bad to "verse." There are many unfamiliar words and lots of confusing jargon! Do you know the difference between a sestina a nd a sonnet? Can you write a poem in iambic pentameter? Visit this site to learn all these terms and more. Many are also illustrated with examples.
Grammar and Style Notes - Are you a little shaky on the parts of speech? Can you tell a preposition from a present participle? The names may be strange, but you use these elements in everyday conversation. A preposition usually describes the object of the sentence and its location in time, space, or relationship to the rest of the sentence. For example, in the next sentence, the prepositions are capitalized: BEFORE the alarm rang, the cat was ON the table. A present participle just adds "-ing" to the rest of the verb: singing, sitting, walking. This resource teaches the parts of speech in a fun and easy way. You'll also learn about punctuation, building sentences and paragraphs, and yes--even spelling. Knowing the correct names for these grammatical terms becomes very important when you begin to learn another language. You'll want to know what the teacher means when talking about French subjunctives and superlatives!
History Channel - Great Speeches - Hear some of the words that changed the world. You'll be able to hear speeches made by Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Douglas MacArthur, as well as historic words like those from Apollo 13: "Houston, we've had a problem." (Hint: For this one, look under John L. Swigert, Jr.)
Hot Internet Sites in Espanol - This is an annotated list of Web sites in Spanish, appropriate for kids as well as their teachers. For those a little rusty on their language skills, the page offers a reminder to use the AltaVista Web page translator, Babelfish.
How Does a Word Get in the Dictionary? - Have you ever wondered how editors of dictionaries choose which words to list and which definitions to use to describe words? This page explains how Merriam-Webster does it, and they should know the best way, because they have been doing it since the 1880s. There are almost 15 million citations for word uses in their database today.
Languages from the BBC - The British Broadcasting Corporation offers tutorials in French, Spanish, German, and Italian. Let's look at Italian. Pick Ice Cream Shop from among the many choices. Activity One is a Shockwave game where you drag the correct Italian phrase over its corresponding cartoon. See those kids waving? They are saying " Ciao ," or good-bye, I bet. Hey look, we got a green check mark, and now there is the sound of everyone cheering! Activity Two makes us listen to a Real Audio conversation about ice cream and drag the right words into the correct sentence gaps. This is fun! There are also English as a Second Language lessons for you to try.
Many Faces of Communication - Explore the world of communication, from the silence of body language to speaking, print, writing, advertising, TV, and of course, the Internet. There's even an ad jingle to promote the World Wide Web. This site was created by students for the ThinkQuest competition.
Native Languages Page - Would you like to learn a little Navajo or a smattering of Quechua? Maybe you'd like to try using a Cherokee font or learn something about Mayan hieroglyphs. This page offers links to all of this and more.
Say Hello to the World Project - If you wanted to say "Hello!" to the world, you'd have to speak 2,796 languages, according to the Internet Public Library. Learn to greet others in quite a few languages here, including Tagalog, Swahili, and Mayan. Hear Real Audio files of the words and then practice on your own.
Secret Language - Psssst! Want to send a secret message to a friend, one that nobody else can possibly decipher? Head on over to this page at San Francisco's Exploratorium, where you can print out a copy of some substitution cipher wheels. Put one inside the other, twirl them around a little bit, and you're in the spy biz!
Word Detective - This syndicated newspaper column has been running since 1953. William Morris started it, and now his son, Evan, does the honors. A short while after the columns run in newspapers, he posts them on this page. Morris answers readers' questions about the English language and its odd words and phrases, such as "busting chops," "lame duck," or "eyes peeled," and he does this cleverly, with wit and humor. He also has a sampling of The Word Detective , a newsletter that "aims for the large grey area between the Oxford English Dictionary and Monty Python."
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