A Whatchamacallit of Wordsmithing Webgets

To begin with, a bit of clarification is in order. If a widget is a mechanical device (think of a nob) and a gadget is a conglomeration of widgets (that's hard to remember), then it seems that the links inside a veritable trove of ninety-nine wordsmith shortcuts are aptly named webgets. Ninety-nine! Alphabetized, categorized and organized web gets into a...a whatchamacallit (help me out here) overflowing with both more and less useful resources.

Acronyms and aptonyms (words aptly suited to their owners).

An online etymology dictionary to help you find the origin of words, and an alternative dictionary of slang, profanities, insults and vulgarisms from many languages around the world.

There's a rhyming dictionary, a fictionary and a pseudodictionary (of made up words), an online graphical dictionary that puts words to pictures and a visual dictionary of words taken from the real world of advertising, signs, graffiti and tattoos.

Of course, there's also a straight dictionary, even one with nearly 100 newly added words (including ginormous).

That's eleven webgets so far.

Then there are the dialects of English and the Chicago Manual of Style, as entertaining as it is informative.

How about the quickly disappearing diner slang, such as soup jockey or maiden's delight?

Or the world's biggest multilingual list of animal sounds?

Here's an interesting list of British English words not commonly used in American English. And then, a list of American words not commonly used in Britain (Wiki).

Do you need a way to better understand really big numbers? Here are some names of really big numbers to put with it and impress a finite number of your friends.

How to say "no" in many languages, and hello, goodbye, thank you and you're welcome.

What are some important infrequently used words to know? For instance, define lagniappe (pronounced lan-yap), poltroon (pronounced pole-troon) and seriatim (pronounced sir-ee-AT-um).

How many of the "33 Names of Things You Never Knew Had Names" did you already know?

That's eleven more webgets, and counting.

Then there is a site with over sixty rhetorical devices (definitions and examples) to help improve writing clarity and effectiveness.

Thirty eight ways to win an argument.

An archive of article manifestos (everything from Seth Godin's charge to rise above mediocrity to Hugh MacLeod's encouraging "How to be creative.").

Infosthetics is an amazing data visualization resource. Even better, Visual Literacy is a visual categorization (periodic table) of techniques for visualizing data, concepts, strategies and metaphors.

Want to learn about the evolution of alphabets?

The history of the English language (both general history, as well as anthology, language families and linguistics)?

The words and phrases Shakespeare invented?

Handy Latin phrases (you can't live without)?

What's spoken where?

Even how to speak as if it were the 19th Century?

That's another eleven, an odd thirty-three, and a prime place to stop this narrative-before-it-becomes-a-run-on-of-epic-proportions-that-drives-a-poor-reader-nuts, without having covered some of the more fun webgets (such as biblical insults or weasel words) practical aids (such as whatshouldireadnext), blogs worth reading (such as BookForum, Language Hat or World Wide Words, international English from a British viewpoint), and without having yet hinted at the twelve (Twelve!) resources for free books online.

Whew!

All 99 webgets of the whatchamacallit (for now, humbly, the Language Arts Guide) here.

Enjoy.