Jump to: Word Fun & Games / Peakewlyer Prowse / Great Word Tricks / Playful Prose & More

Word Fun and Games:

The Brain Food site.  Samuel Stoddard offers word, number, and logic puzzles that will keep your brain cells well nourished.  He also maintains the wacky Dialectizer site, which translates text or web pages into silly dialects, like: Redneck, Swedish Chef, and Elmer Fudd.  Be aware that the translation service has a history of not working for days at a time.  I suspect that may happen when the site exceeds its assigned bandwidth for the month.

The CRpuzzles website from Calvin J. Hamilton & Randall L. Whipkey.  Its online offerings include free crossword puzzles, kriss krosses, cryptograms, word searches, logic problems, and other puzzle magazine style games.

Fun with Words, the Wordplay website from Daniel Austin.  Offers word games, puzzles, oxymorons, palindromes, Spoonerisms, Malapropisms, tongue twisters, and much more.  Home of an online version of Ambrose Bierce's tongue-in-cheek work, "The Devil's Dictionary".

The Linguistic Fun Page from Phillip (Ojo) Eberz.  Just what it says.  Word play, misquotes, oxymorons, funny translations, and more.  Good links too.

Word Plays Interactive Word Games by Richard DeSimine.  Home of several online versions of the Boggle word game.  Also offers a timed word game with crossword puzzle like clues, word puzzle tools, and an online dictionary.  Viewable in different languages.

Peakewlyer Prowse:

The Bartleby.com - Great Books Online website.  Offers an impressive online library of literary classics and reference books.  Titles include: Agamemnon, Aesop's Fables, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations from 1919, Emily Post's Etiquette, the King James Bible, Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, Robert’s Rules of Order Revised, Roget's II Thesaurus, The World Fact Book from 2001, and many other distinguished works.  An excellent resource.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.  This inspired and famous literary competition asks entrants to compose the opening line of the world's worst novel.  Don't miss the list of previous winning entries.

The Homepage du jour of Steven Morgan Friedman.  Among other cool stuff, Steven offers several great WordPlay goodies, like his cliché finder, curious word origins, and selections from the humorous poetry of Ogden Nash.

Project Gutenberg.  Offers a growing collection of online books, including many literary classics from around the world.  Among these are Homer's The Iliad, Marcus Vitruvius Pollio's Ten Books on Architecture, and William Shakespeare's MacBeth.

Verbivore.  Funny articles from the hand of Richard Lederer, the famous English language columnist.

The Word Detective website.  Evan Morris's online version of his newspaper column about words and language.  Very entertaining!

Great Word Tricks:

The Art of John Langdon.  Maker of ambigrams, words written in such a manner that they may be read from multiple points of view.

Bings's Translator and Google's Language Tools.  Free services that provide rough translations of web pages and text in a variety of languages.  I have found that copying and pasting the text directly from a web page often works when the URL translator gets too bogged down to work.

The Komninos Zervos website.  A fascinating collection of multimedia poetry.

The Grandiloquent Dictionary.  Christopher Bird's collection of rare and obscure English words for logophiles.

The Internet Anagram Server from Anu Garg.  Takes a word or phrase and rearranges the letters to form other words and phrases, sometimes yielding very funny results.  Part of her Wordsmith.org site, which offers several other cool linguistic goodies.

The OneLook Dictionaries website.  Provides powerful single word searches across hundreds of online dictionaries.  Better than having an unabridged dictionary at your fingertips.

The Palindromist website.  An ezine dedicated to palindromes (words and phrases that read the same both forward and backwards, like "Dennis and Edna Sinned").  Offers a modest collection of palindromes on site.  One must subscribe or sample back issues for more scholarly, in-depth coverage.

PseudoDictionary.com.  A lighthearted catalog of made-up and unconventional words and phrases.  You can even submit your own for possible inclusion.

Rhymezone.  An online rhyming dictionary site.  Also includes works of literature such as Shakespeare and Mother Goose, as well as literary quotations, quizzes, games, and more.

Playful Prose and More

The Aha! Jokes website.  Big collection of clean jokes, funny pictures, and general silliness.

The Brain Candy site.  Offers jokes, wordplay, insults, riddles, quotations and more.

The Funnybone website.  A big collection of jokes, insults, and humorous stories.  A good place for jokes of all sorts.

The Laughnet website.  Another big collection of jokes, insults, and humorous stories.

Pun ME.  Pun fun and one liners on tap here every day.

Wise Old Sayings.  A collection of quotes, proverbs and sayings gathered from all over the world.  Includes its own Ultimate Word Game Guide as well.

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