Woot competitors, take note: Maybe your site’s name could have been Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Year” if only you’d put in an order for a truckload or two of these electronic dictionaries-cum-mp3-players!

We kid, we kid. Merriam-Webster’s selection of “w00t” as the word of 2007 had nothing to do with our purchase of today’s item, as far as we know. Whatever selection process those word-nerds use, it’s probably perfectly fair and transparent. (We doubt, though, that it’s as purely democratic as the one we used to determine today’s Derby-winning shirt over at shirt.woot. It was voted into production by you!)

That’s not to say that we’re above greasing a palm now and then. But let’s be clear: We’re talking about “the somewhat concave part of the human hand between the bases of the fingers and the wrist or the corresponding part of the forefoot of a lower mammal.” Not “any of a family (Palmae syn. Arecaceae) of mostly tropical or subtropical monocotyledonous trees, shrubs, or vines with usually a simple stem and a terminal crown of large pinnate or fan-shaped leaves.”

That important distinction can be found in this itty-bitty lexiconitron, along with the spellings and definitions of over 274,000 other words, and the state-of-the-art search technology to help you find ‘em.

Like, remember when you asked Miss Seeger how to spell “armistice” (or whatever), and she told you to look it up? And you sat there in front of the giant, musty-smelling old classroom dictionary—the one that generations of foul-minded schoolkids had conditioned to open directly to the dirty words—and you wondered how in the world you were supposed to look up a words you couldn’t spell in the first place?

The M-W crew has solved that little paradox just as neat as you please with their patented phonetic spell-correction, making you’re spelling airers a thing of the passed. Handy, eh?

And hey, it’s got an mp3 player in it! That’s kind of weird. But if you like that, you’re going to love the combination electric corkscrew and complete works of Charles Dickens no doubt in development somewhere. Good thing, too, because it’ll almost certainly be us who ends up selling it.

Back to top