I tell you what I really could use right about now… a random dictionary. I’ve searched all over the web and I can’t find a piece of software or a web site that will plunder an extensive dictionary for a random word and definition. Why would I want to reverse engineer a dictionary? Surely the point of dictionaries is that you know a word but you don’t know what it means. You look it up.You find it out.

But that’s not what I want. I have a perfectly good dictionary in Dictionary.com which is the best free online dictionary going. What I need is a means to find random words drawn from a very large word list. Why? Because that is the way I come up with story and article ideas. Choose three random words out of the dictionary like so:

evangelical
numbers
photoluminescence

and you have a trio of concepts which you can work from to make a story. Say from this set we get a thought about a crusade, a group of knights either from the past or future, who follow a religion based on numbers. And guess what? – they glow in the dark! A silly example, but already we have a basis for a story. Snatching these words out of a dictionary is physically difficult. You cannot be truly random, and a big enough dictionary that has enough words in it is often heavy and unwieldy.

If you know of any such resources on the Internet, please let me know, I’ll be happy to check them out.

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