For the first time in a number of years, I took part in NaNoWriMo last month. The challenge I set for myself was to write a short story a day using prompts from Word of the Day posts from various dictionary websites (yes, I was a NaNo rebel!). Was this a rash thing to do? Well, it didn’t go quite as smoothly as planned, but it wasn’t a bad thing. This is what I learned about those dictionaries in the process. Bear in mind that I’m mainly talking about this in terms of using the words as Writing Prompts every day for a month. This is very different from using them as a casual word-learning resource.

Merriam-Webster

The selection of words from Merriam-Webster was generally good and varied. There was a nice mixture of well-known words and slightly less well-known, and most of them made excellent writing prompts. However, the definitions on the Word of the Day page were pretty short. Because I already knew most of the words, this wasn’t an issue, but for my purposes, in some cases, they could have been a little fuller.

However, on looking at the website again, as I write this, they seem to have changed the format of the page and added to the information immediately available, which is much better. You still have to click through for a full definition, though.

Dictionary.com

Dictionary.com, again, had a good general selection of words. What I really liked about their page was that they gave you a lot of detail right there. Just by scrolling down from the short definition you got word origins, usage and a pronounciation clip. This made my life a lot easier and for an introduction to new words, I think this is definitely a good website.

Collins Dictionary

I have a bone to pick with the Collins Dictionary. Well, in terms of my writing prompts. Collins likes to theme their Word of the Day posts to current events, like COP26 (OMG was I sick of climate-related words by the time they changed tack). There was also a Diwali collection and a Saint Andrew’s Day theme within the month. I wish I hadn’t chosen to use their words as prompts, because I began to feel stifled by them. Yes, I could’ve stopped using them, but that would’ve been failing in my challenge. From a pure learning point of view, though, I’m sure people would get quite a bit from the theming. However, I didn’t think their mini-definitions were the best, which is partly because they were trying to put concepts in there, rather than single words, on occasion. There just wasn’t enough space for a proper definition, and I had to click through to another page to get the full details.

OED

The OED Word of the Day is like your quirky cousin, the one who always uses strange words you don’t really understand. They seem to delight in choosing archaic and rarely used words and I have to say, I loved this. It certainly helped to add colour to what I was writing. I wasn’t that keen on the format on their website, though. They put the word in a tiny box in a sidebar and every time I had to click through to see what the word’s full definition was, because there usually wasn’t enough space for it. But, for sheer novelty and the mind-stretching effect of their word choices, I’d definitely use their site again.

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So, those are my brief thoughts on using these sites for writing prompts. I’ll be talking about another aspect of my NaNo challenge next week.