freerice.com
I’ve been editing for most of the day, but there have been some distractions, and freerice.com is one of them. It’s a not-for-profit site that apparently uses ad revenue to give away rice through the United Nations World Food Program… and it’s also a vocabulary game. An addictive vocabulary game. It gives you a word, and you have to choose its meaning from a list of four.
The FAQ says it has 50 levels, so naturally I couldn’t stop until I reached that point.
Reading widely, reading science fiction and fantasy (hello SRD!), exposure to other languages and to different dialects of English, some familiarity with legalese, and playing MTG all helped here. I definitely encountered plenty of words I didn’t know. Attempting etymological analysis with those helped a lot. I made it up to 48 fairly quickly, dropped, got back to 49, dropped, gave up, and returned later to get to 50. Back to editing…
10 Dec 2007 at 10:51
Argh, you got me hooked, and I had to get up to level 50, too. I was a little disappointed, though, that there wasn’t some sort of fanfare when I got there. But then later I was wondering, maybe something special happens if you go past level 50, i.e., if you get three level 50 words correct. Did you take it that far? Who knows; maybe it’s just another 20 grains of that darn rice.
17 Dec 2007 at 12:14
Brett: I think it’s just another 20 grams… I’m pretty sure I did get three words right at some point after hitting level 50, and I don’t think anything happened. Yes, that is a bit of a letdown—but I guess they don’t want you to have a sense of accomplishment that causes you to stop playing and hence to stop contributing rice!
24 Mar 2008 at 04:39
in the wiki page about freerice they show an image of what happens when you get to 100,000 grains..