Instructify

Finally, you can find out the name of those little holes in your shoe you thread the laces through (eyelet). The Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary Online sorts pictures of words by category (home, transportation, astronomy, sports and games, all kinds of stuff). You can then look at the pictures to visually identify what you’re looking for.

The Visual Dictionary works great at helping students figure out a specific part for a complex thing like, say, a combustion engine. Or you identify that spider crawling on your desk to see if it’s poisonous. And best of all, you no longer have to describe something as, “That doohickey that detaches from the thing.” –BILL FERRIS

Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary Online

With all the shorthand OMG LOL business happening in children’s lives, sites like Merriam-Webster’s Word Central help to rectify the damage that has been done. Here, youngsters can get a leg up on building their own vocabulary while having fun. There are a couple of games, including Robo-Bee, which tests users’ language skills and word choice, and BIGbot where you feed the right vocabulary words to a hungry robot based on the definitions given. You’ll also find a Daily Buzzword with complete archive and an RSS feed to keep your students in the know. And as you might expect from Merriam-Webster, there is a searchable dictionary, thesaurus and rhyming dictionary.

One of the niftiest aspects of the site, though, is the Build Your Own Dictionary. In a pseudo-wiki format, this feature allows users to submit their own words and definitions. Some are hilarious:

juggleglug
Function: verb
Definition: to juggle and drink something at the same time. Example Sentence: That clown sure knows how to juggleglug.

and others are more hilarious, and even rather useful:

smorange
Function: adjective
Definition: extraordinary or special and different from other people but wanting to fit in at times. Word History: decided to make up a word that rhymes with orange

Example Sentence: She is very smorange.

There are some great resources for teachers here, too, including information that answers the question: How do words get in the dictionary? Check out the site to find out. –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Word Central

I love my word processor. It’s fast, convenient, and comes with one of the great boons to mankind, the spell checker. Maybe my over-reliance on a computerized dictionary is why I never went farther in my Spanish classes. All that technology, and it still couldn’t tell me when I’d made a typo. But now, foreign language students can ensure their spelling is sublime with Orangoo.

Orangoo is simplicity itself. Just paste your text into the text box, select from one of two dozen supported languages like Spanish, English, Russian, Italian, Turkish, Danish, and lots more (sorry Latin). Then hit the “Check spelling” link. Misspelled words will be highlighted, and Orangoo will suggest words from its dictionary. Pretty much like your standard spell-check, except a lot more versatile. If you’re technically inclined, Orangoo’s code is open-source, so feel free to install it in your own Web applications.

Aren’t you glad you now know about Orangoo? For that matter, aren’t you glad I didn’t write, “Orangoo glad”? –BILL FERRIS

With the success of technological advancements catapulting us into a world full of visual stimuli, learners are becoming more and more in need of visual qualifiers in order to completely understand a topic. Wikipedia and its brethren have done a wonderful job of linking topics by embedding links to other articles on the site and what the relationship is between subjects. Unfortunately, so often it happens that you’ll be doing some light research on Cane Toads, and the next thing you know, you’re on an article about Ultima Online shard emulation and you have no breadcrumbs to show you the path that led you into this distraction. Visuwords is the remedy for these black holes of information. The site is predominantly an application designed to visually show the links between words and their meanings, origins, and uses.

Simply type in a word into the search space, or hit the Random button to get a completely arbitrary word. The word appears as the center, and suddenly becomes surrounded by wistfully hovering orbs, each with a bond to other words that relate to it. Because of the Flash element to the application, you can drag the viewing area around, and you can expand any of the links and their subsequent connections just by double clicking one of the bubbles. The bubbles are color coded by noun, verb, adjective and adverb. The connections between the words are color coded and specific – for example, a solid green line means, “is a kind of.” Think of this as the model of an atom, with the search word as your nucleus, and the surrounding words as the electrons and such that make up the atom. Check it out for yourself, and maybe you’ll find that visually learning words and their meanings might be your thing. –JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Visuwords

My senior year of high school, my family hosted a Thai foreign exchange student. Some mornings I spent the entire ride to school modeling pronunciations for her. She was endlessly fascinated with the sequence of sounds in “oil” (and endlessly frustrated trying to produce them herself) and would have me toil through “boil, broil, coil” ‘til my tongue felt despoiled by the moil of it. I was not always the most patient instructor.

If only I could have offered my eager student the services of Chuala.com, where you can hear looped recordings of standard pronunciations: voila (which looks like it rhymes with “oil” but thankfully doesn’t), tireless tutor. My favorite part of the site is that you’re able to record yourself saying a word and listen to it in comparison to the site’s pronunciation in turn. Students who come across difficult new words in their readings could look them up here, or you could check on the pronunciations of words that have always given you trouble (I practiced with “accompanist”… I never say that right!).

The site offers pronunciations in 9 other languages, so it could potentially be of service in foreign language classrooms. My own searches in Spanish were disappointing, not even the days of the week were offered, but Chuala is a “language community,” so if you find words that are missing you can register to add them yourself.

One word of warning: the woman who speaks the samples is no computerized voice, she’s a total sweet-talker… monitor your time on the site, if you notice yourself looking up words like “cat” you may have fallen victim to her siren song. –MARIELLE PRINCE

Chuala.com

Related Stuff:
Say it Like You Mean It – howjsay.com

From homophones to the Great Vowel Shift to good ol’ colloquialisms, there are plenty of reasons that the English language has a hard time making the transfer from talk to text. If reading your students’ papers has become tortuous for your grammatical sensibilities, try and have blundering writers figure out what they should of done differently by checking out Washington State University Professor Paul Brians’ list of Common Errors in English.

Here they’ll find out why implying isn’t the exact same as inferring, and when its right to put a space into “into.” The list is presented alphabetically and all on one page – a bit daunting at first glance, but clicking on any of the troublesome words leads to a comfortingly concise and easy to understand explanation. Brians makes clear distinctions between usages that are ungrammatical and usages that simply non-standard, and sometimes includes interesting factoids about the history of the word’s use.

As always, insure that you can walk the talk first… do you ever make any of the errs I made hear? If so, you might want to give the site a look-see yourself! -MARIELLE PRINCE

Common Errors in English

I’ve always loved hearing the rich tones of people speaking their native tongue. Probably because my high school Spanish class was so full of students (myself included) torturing words and botching the accent. Back then, they equipped us with a cassette tape so we could hear the language spoken correctly.

It’s too bad sites like Mango weren’t around then. Mango is a site featuring several free language learning courses, each loaded with digital audio and flash animation that highlights the pronunciation of every word. Select from languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, Russian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, and German. There are also courses in English for speakers of these other languages, so it could be very helpful if you’re an ESL teacher. –BILL FERRIS

Mango

The problem with learning a foreign language is you have to learn all those words. That’s doubly-true in Latin–in a dead language, you can’t use the common tourist trick of simply talking English really loud (I SAID, WHERE IS THE BATHROOM?!?)

If you’re trying to teach young students some Latin vocabulary, you’ll want to see these free Latin Flash Cards from Classical Academic Press. The words are from their Latin for Children series, so you won’t be tackling anything too intimidating like Vergil. With three levels of difficulty and 32 chapters’ worth of words, these cards should keep your kids busy until the Roman Coliseum finally collapses to the ground. –BILL FERRIS

Latin Flash Cards

Quetzalcoatl. Rhinopharyngitis. Mnemosyne. If you tried to say these out loud you’d either have an aneurism or accidentally open a portal to the underworld. Fortunately, there’s a safe way to speak difficult words thanks to howjsay.com.

Howjsay.com (as in, “How do you say…”) is a free online pronunciation dictionary. Just type in a word and listen to its pronunciation. It’s ideal for students tackling a difficult reading assignment, and at the very least is much easier than the hieroglyphic pronunciation guide in written dictionaries. Now you can finally hear those unpronounceable terms from biology in English.

Mind you, that’s the Queen’s English, young squire. Howjsay.com pronounces all words in a stately British accent. This makes the pronunciations sound more official, as well as lets you have fun with limey diction. Be amazed as our friends across the pond transform “blueberry” into “BLOO-bree.” Through some sort of lingual alchemy, howjsay.com inserts a phantom vowel into “aluminum” (pronounced on the site as “a-loo-MIN-i-yum”). Howjsay.com also voices the “h” in “herbs.” Now I’m no longer confused by the Harry Potter movies when they’d need to find some mystery dudes named Herb to make a potion.

Still, English English is close enough for most words you’ll run into, and would it be so terrible for your slang-slinging students to speak the language of Shakespeare? So tonight after you take the lift up to your flat and eat your fish and chips in front of the telly, visit howjsay.com and pronounce like a pro. –BILL FERRIS
Howjsay.com