Words – words – words

Here’s one for the lovers of words! If you like to add to your vocabulary and learn the most engaging stories about words, here is a fantastic site for you! "The music and magic of words that’s what A Word A Day (AWAD) is all about," so says the author of this website. AWAD is a daily electronic publication from the “wordserver” at http://www.wordsmith.org/awad. It includes a vocabulary word, its definition, pronunciation information - even with an audio clip, etymology, usage example, quotation, and other very interesting titbits about words sent to those addicted subscribers every day.

Words are usually selected around a theme each and every week. The site also offers an on-line dictionary and thesaurus, an "anagramizer" (try keying in your name and find out what else can be spelled out from the combination of letters) but most popular of all is certainly A Word a Day.

The brains behind this site say: "You can think of it as a word trek where we explore strange new words," and have just celebrated it’s, the site’s, tenth anniversary on March 14. It now has more than 570,000 subscribers in 201 countries.

An archive also readily documents all the AWADs that have been featured since 1994, so any new visitors to the site can easily look back to the beginning. Themes, which have tied up the week’s words since 1996, are also a fun way of looking at AWAD.

What exactly is A.Word.A.Day or AWAD?
It all began as an idea for displaying a word and its definition on a terminal whenever the user, who happened to be the site’s designer and author, logged on every morning during his graduate studies. He had so much fun with his obsession for words, he thought, "and wouldn’t it be great if other people could also receive this?" Subsequently wordserver was born in March of 1994.

Technically AWAD is said to a daily electronic publication from the wordserver at Wordsmith.Org. AWAD includes a vocabulary word, its definition, pronunciation information with audio clip, etymology, usage example, quotation, and other interesting tidbits about words to subscribers every day. You can think of it as a word trek where strange new words are explored. Words are usually selected around a theme every week.

Ok, so just what is a wordserver, then?
Wordserver is a term that the site’s designer, chose to describe a generic name for the computer server that runs words related services. Wordserver is essentially what its name implies - server of words. Besides A.Word.A.Day, it also runs a number of other interesting reference and fun services. It also performs functions such as processing subscription requests, keeping logs, generating statistics etc.

You mentioned themes – how does that work?
The words that are chosen are sometimes as common as "peninsula" or "bad hair day," and sometimes as rare as "gyrovague" (a term for a monk who travels from place to place) or "onychophagia" (the habit of biting your nails). Often the author will group a week's worth of words around a theme; for example, gender-specific nouns such as "gynarchy" (government by women).

Usually the themes are highly amusing. when I first tried AWAD, the theme was words for insults (benighted, zoophyte). Then there were words for body parts used figuratively (jawbone, chinwag, toothsome, palmary, flatfoot). This weeks theme applies to “descriptive words to apply to people” eg tub-thumper - A noisy, vigorous promoter or speaker.

The X-Bonus, was: One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. -Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)

One commentator states that, ”not surprisingly, the service evokes passionate reactions as indicated by the feedback featured in the AWAD e-bulletin sent out to subscribers. Some point out mistakes, others offer additional meanings of AWAD selections; some share their language misadventures—all apparently bonded by an enthusiasm for words, words and more words”.

How many people are now using this service?
Currently AWAD has e-mailed a word a day plus its definition, pronunciation and roots, to an increasingly large group of recipients. The free e-mail list, which started with about 200 subscribers, has ballooned to more than 570,000 in at least 201 countries.

This number includes only those who get it directly from Wordsmith.org -- it does not include people who get AWAD via mail exploders, local Usenet newsgroups, WWW pages, and other bulletin board systems:

Can you only get emails or can you do other things?
This is an extensive Web site with numerous features for word lovers, including a dictionary, a thesaurus and anagram and acronym finders. Interestingly it also maintains a message board and compiles a monthly newsletter from the hundreds of e-mails he that are received. The sites author also hosts online chats so subscribers can query interesting people and other luminaries.

You can do a full-text search on the AWAD site. There are two indexes available: the whole site (minus the daily words and quotes archives), or the archives only. There are some other really fun and great features as well. To mention just a few:

Dictionary/by/Mail
To find the definition of a word:
define myword
where myword is the word whose definition you want to find out.

Thesaurus/by/Mail
Thesaurus/by/Mail
To find the synonyms of a word:
synonym myword
where myword is the word whose synonyms you want to find out.

Acronym/by/Mail
Acronym/by/Mail
To unscramble an acronym, make the subject line as:
acronym myword
where myword is the acronym whose expansion you want to find out.

How much does it cost to use the site?
There is no charge to subscribe to AWAD it is free. However for those who choose, a premium subscription service is available at US$25.00

Arthur Hissey
Computer Research & Technology
www.crt.net.au