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Wander the web like a shoreline.
Something new washes up every time: pages from all kinds of people, made with all kinds of tools. Beachcomb shows you what it found, then gets out of the way.
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Welcome to Wordorigins.org
Detail of Bayeux Tapestry: Norman cavalry attacking an English fort. Image by Myrabella, 2013, licensed under Creative Commons. And we’re on Bluesky and Mastodon too. You can also follow the site on Mastodon and on Bluesky. I am no longer posting on the site formerly known as Twitter. Latest posts:…
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Wordoid
Random word generator with toggles for language, quality, patterns, length, and domain availability.
From Tiny Tools Directory
Wordnik
The world’s largest online dictionary with definitions from multiple sources, example sentences, rhymes, conceptual links, and related words.
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RainbowSay – Learn, teach, research languages live with shows you love
RainbowSay is a Mac app for learning or teaching a language from the shows, movies, videos and podcasts you already love — sentence by sentence, with AI translation, vocabulary, grammar, speaking practice and live subtitles. Free to start.
From Show HN
Something Something Soup Something
ludwig wittgenstein's 'language-game', as a game
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How the Words We Teach English Language Learners Changed
How the words we teach English language learners changed.
From The Pudding
Philip Sidney and the Extreme (Dis)graces of the Parenthesis
Erasmus called them “little moons” and George Puttenham praised them as “figures of tolerable disorder” (if used not too often “nor too thick”). For Philip Sidney, they were simply indispensable. Florence Hazrat introduces us to the uncontested early modern king of brackets and to his romance…
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NYC's Urban Textscape
What if you could search every visible word on New York City’s streets?
From The Pudding
An Incident
Early 15c., “something which occurs casually in connection with something else,” from Old French incident (13c.), and directly from Latin incidentem (nominative incidens), present participle of incidere “to fall in, fall, find the way; light upon, fall in with; fall upon, occur; happen, befall” –…
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Talk to Transformer
Chat with a GPT2 text AI model, perhaps useful in generating that next line when you’ve got writer’s block.
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rot8000
Caesar-cypher encryption that replaces each Unicode character with the one 0x8000 places forward or back.
From Tiny Tools Directory
cleartext-mac
A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English.
From Tiny Tools Directory
Anagram Artist
(Requires email registration) A text editor for composing anagrams.
From Tiny Tools Directory
Text Fixer
Misc online text tools, including word to html, remove line breaks, random nouns, more.
From Tiny Tools Directory
Glyph Generator
A generator of glyphs for use in games, world building or for fun.
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Orca
An esoteric language, usable as a live coding environment that can send and create MIDI, OSC & UDP signals.
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That's this stretch.
Walk on