If you love words the way I do, you’d love this.

Amazing. I started off with “abatement“. See for yourself. Clicking on the nodes of the network, it expands the network. You can move the network by moving the mouse while holding down the left button. By hovering over the node, you see the definitions. I ended up getting to the node “law, jurisprudence” and if I wanted, I could have spent the whole day on the site.

Visuwords bills itself as “an online graphical dictionary.” Enter a word, and the site blossoms with a display of the search term’s synonyms, antonyms, meronyms (words that name a part of a larger whole), and even hypernyms (words that are more generic than a given word ). [From "Magers & Quinn."]

The web is the most fascinating, entertaining, edifying and instructive tool available to us. It contains practically all that you need to educate yourself. But it also contains a lot of stuff that is mediocre, bad, incorrect, and plain old stupid nonsense. The challenge is to somehow filter out the crap and get to the good bits. I would like to collect all the good bits in a box and make copies of the box and put the box all over the place so that kids can have free access to the material and learn by themselves with a little help from other kids.