In the case of words that sound the same and have multiple spellings, most spell checkers aren’t able to know what your trying to say so they may not catch the difference. The bigger named spell checkers do more than check the letters, they also make suggestions that you chose the wrong ‘their, they’re, there’.

Some people remember things with images better than just a list of words and rules. Here is a couple fun infographics we found about Misspelled and Misused Words.

For ‘Misspelled’,15 Most Misspelled English Words Infographic is a fun overview of words that look similar but can be spelled wrong. Using a spell checker would catch these…

A shorter list but with a lot of fun with it’s graphics is 8 Commonly Misused Words . This infographic outlines 8 words that have multiple spellings and with each are a different meaning. They are very easily switched and thus saying something different than you meant to say.

For our little discussion here, we searched around for the top most used words in a couple areas. First, the ‘Most Often Overused Buzzwords in Press Releases‘. This article researched Press Releases for how often catch words was used. They came back with a very interesting top 100 words. Sometimes word lists lead people to avoid using those words, this time the words will ring a bell with you later when your reading a press release as just another attempt to get your attention.

The second group of interesting often used words is: The 20 Words and Phrases That Will Get You the Most ReTweets. In the world of Twitter posts, there are those that are posts about what a person had for lunch, there is information posts to share news with others, and there are posts from folks being used for marketing. The last group spends a lot of time trying to word their 140 character posts just right to get people to re-tweet (share) with others. This get’s the marketer more attention.

What makes them special (fun… cool…) is that the variety of countries the have are made up of city and state words to make up the shape of the country. Words vary in size depending on state vs city and then key cities. Of course there are no mountains, roads or country created state lines you may see on convention maps.

A few of the countries covered; New Zealand, Australia and the United States.

It is interesting how many single word movie names tell you what the movie is about and how many are just a word until you see the movie and how it relates. Have fun with these:

Alien
Big
Blow
Caddyshack
Casablanca
Changeling
Choke
Clerks
Clueless
CocktailDune
Deliverance
Enchanted
Ghost
Gladiator
Glory
Go
Grindhouse
Halloween
Heat
Jaws
Jaws
Moon
Moonstruck
Platoon
Psycho
Saw
Scarface
Scream
Seven
Shrek
Speed
Titanic
Trainspotting
Tron
Up
Vertigo

Chris Harrison has taken information available from many sources, not the least all the data Google collects and has build a series of graphics showing the path in single words between two opposite words. I would encourage you to take the time to visit the site to understand the full scope of the collection and analyzing of the words. To give you a quick idea that the reporting of the data was no easy task:

“To better achieve a even distribution, I normalized the frequencies of bigrams based on total primary term frequency. So, for example, in the case of war vs. peace, there are 81,839,381 bigrams starting with war and 31,263,375 bigrams starting with peace. If I render the spectrum without normalization, it ends up lopsided toward war (since the usage totals are so much higher). To compensate, I scale down all of war’s bigrams so that the overall frequencies are even.“

The original project was called Word Spectrum, here is a low resolution example of one of the many graphics available. Each graphic on Chris’s site are done as a high def PDF so you can download and examine at your leisure.

As the process continues, Chris rethought the layout of the words and the path of single words leading from one end of a though to the opposite. These are called Word Associations. Again, available to view online or download as PDFs.

Before we get to a check list of what the day holds, and even before anyone works on a project plan – we map out what we are trying to get done and the many parts of what will make our finished deliverable a success.

A great tool to do this is MindMaps. For anyone who is not familiar with MindMaps, think of it as a core deliverable with all of the parts that make it possible spidering out from the center. There are thousands of books on the subject and many software titles available to help. A whiteboard is all you really need to set one up with a group, but software is nice if you need to share or change later.

If you look around on the Internet for MindMapping posts, you will find that people can really get into the process. They put descriptions on each of the spider legs and all kinds of fun drawings. For us, here, let’s keep it very simple and explore what you can say with just one word.

From MindTools:

Mind Maps are more compact than conventional notes, often taking up one side of paper. This helps you to make associations easily. And if you find out more information after you have drawn the main Mind Map, then you can easily add it in.

Mind Maps are also useful for:

* Summarizing information.
* Consolidating information from different research sources.
* Thinking through complex problems.
* Presenting information in a format that shows the overall structure of your subject.

A couple of the better known MindMapping software solutions are: www.thinkbuzan.com and www.mindjet.com/ – they both offer all kinds of videos and instructions.

Information Tamers has a very nice article taking your through the process of simple to very detailed. Not being wrapped around a particular software, the post is about the how and why for using MindMaps.

Since, so many great ideas start when your not at your desktop or in front of a whiteboard, there are a couple nice apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. There are actually about a dozen apps, but these two are ones I actually use because they make it easy to share via a free box.net account (you can also upload to your desktop via your wireless network or email). The outputs can be an image or PDF if you just want to show someone your ideas, or they can be imported into your desktop MindMapping app.

The smaller screens force me to keep the lines to one word. Let’s see if I can stick to that when using the apps on a iPad when it comes out.

iThoughts

iBlueSky

The folks at Healthful Changes have done a nice job of aligning quotes from famous people throughout history to match the Words of Inspiration. A card with one of these quotes may have more of a dramatic impact. You will still know the word that describes the emotion your sending with your message, the reader will understand what your trying to say.

Some of the words expanded with quotes include:
WISDOM
THOUGHTS
SUCCESS
RELATIONSHIPS
POTENTIAL
LEARNING
HOPE
FAITH
ADVERSITY

End Rhymes (blue/shoe)

Last Syllable Rhymes (timber/harbor)

Double Rhymes (conviction/prediction)

Triple Rhymes (frightening/brightening)

Beginning Rhymes (physics/fizzle)

First Syllable Rhymes (carrot/caring)

rhymer.com offers a online search engine for words via their 93,000-word dictionary. They also offer a desktop version of their software for faster reference.

rhyme.poetry.com offers a search engine for rhyming words with a few extras – Organize results by syllables or letters and can include phrases.

A post about rhyming words wouldn’t be complete without a mention of words that can’t be rhymed. Most everyone has heard of Orange and Silver. There is actually quite a list of words over at “List of English words without rhymes”. This page is good to glance at before spend a weekend trying to finish of your poem where you need something that matches up to ‘wolf’ only to find out that there is such word.

Looking around Flickr today, I was overjoyed to discover Raham has taken on the challenge to have a Flickr area of Single Word images. He has 356 images in the group currently, and looks to be growing. While it’s nothing more than a bunch of pictures of words found everywhere in the world, that is what makes it fun!

From Raham about adding to the collection:
The Purpose Of This Group

To collect a large database of photographed single words.
Images of photographed words (not text created with a graphics program, nor screen-captures).

Rules

Images must be of a SINGLE word, cropped so that word fills the image.

“The Big Word Project has been set up by Paddy Donnelly and Lee Munroe, two Masters students from Northern Ireland, who are exploring what different words mean to different people. The project allows you to purchase a word from our list to represent your site. Your site will then represent this word in our list and when people click on it, they will be taken to your site. The project is aimed at changing definitions and creating a new tapestry of words, meaning altogether different things.”

The creators do charge for that single word association which gives me mixed feelings. I can see someone in a school or for a fun project doing this for free. I don’t have an issue with anyone making money and these folks have a effective simplistic site that makes it unique… you decide. Even if you don’t ‘buy’ your word, it’s a site to visit when looking for one word associated with one site.