Friday Focus – Word Fun

Welcome to our new blog series, ‘Friday Focus.’  The aim of this series is to encourage community conversation and learning through a wide variety of topics. Twice a month we’ll be focusing mainly on library-related themes, but also throw in some random technology tips and tools that you hopefully find useful/interesting/amusing.

To start the first post off on a fun note, I wanted to cover a couple of sites I found recently:

  1. Merriam-Webster’s Time Traveler and
  2. Random Word Generator

With Merriam-Webster’s Time Traveler, you can input any year to see which words were added to the dictionary, from before the 12th Century to the current year.  I put in my birth year of 1977 and was pleasantly surprised to find ‘scratch ticket’ was added that year – one of my favorite things to throw away money on…

screenshot of 1977 words added to dictionary

The Random Word Generator has soooo many fun possibilities – use it to write some poetry, create your band name, draft nonsensical letters to loved ones..the possibilities are endless, really.  I love that you can choose the number and type of words (noun, verb, adjective) and even the number of syllables (doesn’t go above 6 sadly, so semiquantitatively won’t be in your mix).

Your turn!  Try them out and let us know in the comments what you come up with!

Posted in Friday Focus, General.

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