A.Word.A.Day is a daily electronic publication dedicated to "the music and magic of words", according to founder and general workhorse Anu Garg. Every weekday subscribers receive a vocabulary word and its definition, along with pronunciation information, etymology, usage example, quotation, and other interesting tidbits about words. Usually each week's words are selected around a theme - words about colour, say, or archaic words, or words containing "ism", to give a few recent examples. In addition, Anu sends a weekly compendium of interesting comments from subscribers about the words they receive. It's an fun and educational bit of daily trivia which I look forward to receiving and which, I must confess, has given rise to more than a few of my own nodes, as well as those of others. Check out some of the softlinks below for examples.

Anu, a computer programmer, originally set up a personal wordserver to show him a new vocabulary word on his computer every morning. (Wordserver is a term Anu coined to refer to a server running word-related services.) Figuring others might enjoy his invention, he began offering A.Word.A.Day free of charge to whoever was interested in mid-March 1994, and by the end of the first month he had almost 1300 subscribers. The numbers have climbed from there, and currently A.Word.A.Day reaches almost half a million people in over 200 countries around the world. A.Word.A.Day is still provided without charge, though, as is the case with your favourite user-built database, donations are welcome.

If you are interested in learning more about A.Word.A.Day, or receiving it for yourself, go to http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/, where you'll find out all you need to know.

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