Dictionary.com Review

I use this site so often as a dictionary that I started to notice all the other features of the site. Turns out, there are a lot of opportunities for ESL students on this site, but you have to be careful; Dictionary.com prides itself on obscure and esoteric words. We don't want to confuse students with "beatitude" and "climacteric". But if you go right to a tab called "Word Dynamo", you get something that's really cool. "How Many Words Do You Know?" is a fun game with a challenging nature that can engage students of all ages. You choose your grade (as early as 1st grade and as late as college students!). Basically, it gives you a word, like "unfortunate", and you must choose the definition. It's randomly generated but as you go along, you get harder words and it generates how many words you likely know, which is really fun and something that kids can take as a challenge! For example, by the 5th word "exhalation", it estimated I knew over 12,000 words. So cool! If you get a word wrong, it reduces the amount of words you know! In encourages you to keep playing in order to increase your score. You can also create a free account and log-in to earn badges. It's pretty cool.

Let's talk about the main function of Dictionary.com: the dictionary! Even in the internet age (and probably especially because of the internet age), students need to know how to use dictionaries and thesauruses. They are useful tools, especially for languages students. Sometimes we forget that not every person knows how to use a dictionary. I taught middle schoolers this summer (they were native English speakers) and was surprised at how many of them struggled with looking up a word like "intrusively"...it's not listed in the dictionary under "intrusively" but rather under "intrude" as a variation (suffix). Of course with the internet, you won't always have problems like this, as the internet is often very specific and right to the point and very, very fast. It may take 3 or 4 minutes to figure out "intrusively" in a hardcover dictionary, but only 10 seconds on Dictionary.com. Students need to learn how to master online dictionaries and thesauruses, so I think it's a worthwhile lesson to go through it with students. The tools on Dictionary.com can be overwhelming. For example, even the "intrusively" entry features a literary quote using the word "intrusively". That's amazing. Each entry has a "Quotes" tab. A teacher could assign an activity where each student gets a word and must use Dictionary.com to create a poster-board featuring the word. The poster-board could feature synonyms and "near-by" words and also the literary quote with a picture of Marquez or Tolstoy or whoever. Students could go on an antonym hunt or search for words in a thesaurus for a crossword.

Above all, I believe it's very important for students to learn to use online dictionaries and thesauruses for straight-forward use, but a creative teacher can also figure out ways to use them in assignments, like the poster-board assignment I mentioned above (you could use MS Publisher for the poster-board). And don't forget about applications like Word Dynamo either! All ages can do this.