Life in a Single Word

“All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.”

Wordnik is built on the theory that people learn words best by seeing them in context. The site has more than 4 billion words of text (web pages, books, magazines, newspapers, etc.) and have mined so that you can find example sentences for any word you’re interested in. Be forewarned, in an attempt to show you info on any word, they show you whatever they have found, for any word you look up.

At Wordnik, you get:

• Real example sentences to show words in context
• Meaningful information about your word’s frequency and use patterns
• Related words—not just synonyms and antonyms, but words that behave in similar ways

I know I’m not the only one, but it seems like it at times. I’m thinking of the perfect word to get my point across, only to find that what I thought it meant isn’t exactly right. Or, more often, spell checker changes a word spelling that sounds the same but now changes the meaning of what I just wrote.

Precede to come before
Proceed to go forward

Historic means an important event.
Historical means something that happened in the past.

A year ago, I found a iPhone (and Touch) application called WordPal that has a list of words that have multiple meanings depending on how you spell them, even though the different spellings sound the same. It was 99 cents so I grabbed it to have it handy when something just doesn’t look right. You can see WordPal in the iTunes App Store here…

If your online with your computer, you can always visit a variety of Web sites that have many words as well… and Free is a even better price! A couple of these sites are CopyBlogger (List of 27 Misused Words) and Richmond Education (Commonly Confused Words). Both handy to look over when online – while not ‘searchable’ they are fun and informative.

Helvetica (Originally called Die Neue Haas Grotesk) was developed in 1957 by Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei. It is so old, so yesterday, we almost always use some other font when creating a document. Not because the lettering is a bad looking font. When asking coworkers, it seems that the reason it isn’t use is because it’s the “default”.

Lucky for us, not everyone feels that way. When searching for examples of Helvetica being used, a article was found that covered 40 main line companies logos that use this as the base font. Here are just a few, to see the whole list takea look at the article over at Web Design Depot.

A popular method to show a group of words and their quantity of occurances is in a ‘Cloud’. Many times you will see a blog that has a column box of words that are sized by how many times that word appears in a article within the pages of that blog.

A Cloud can be helpful when watching trends and you do not have time to so a pull of data and compare that in a spreadsheet. Some more artistic Clouds have words floating about and changing sizes as quantities change. This is fun to watch but not very useful if your attempting to do something with the data.

Here is a Cloud that is pointed at Twitter. Where instead of showing every word, it shows 200 matching words in tweets based on a base word you enter. You can play with it at the developers, Jeff Clark created this on Neoformix.

We are ‘almost’ ready…