Word of the Day

This is a way to always keep Spanish somewhere in the active part of your brain....assuming you actually open up the daily emails or visit the website. My subscription lists the word and it's meaning in the summary area, so even if I'm too lazy to open the email I am exposed to the word.

Spanish Dictionary's Word of the Day is my favorite WOD website. The definition is fairly complete, the sample sentences are interesting, with an intermediate level vocabulary, and when you click on the highlighted Spanish word you are taken to a dictionary page with more details. You can also scroll back through previous WODs. I like this site so much that I have been cutting and pasting each day on my Flashcard Machine account. I think the sentences have added value in increasing your vocabulary as they always seem to be filled with words that will be useful elsewhere.

The linked dictionary page, which will have additional definitions and outlines uses of the word in various Spanish phrases. The site works ok on my Android phone; on both my phone and computer it can be difficult navigating to the WOD part of the website from the main page.

If you "like" this page on Facebook you will get your WOD delivered there. This may also be true of the Twitter link. I'm not sure about email delivery; I need to do more research.

Spanish Central also has a nice WOD component, though it is fairly simplified. The definition tends to be just a few words and there are one or two, usually fairly simple sentences. I subscribe to this one via email and it's fun to hide the English translation of the sentence until I've done my best guessing on the meaning. If you like them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter it looks like you are only creating a general link to Merriam-Webster and not to the Spanish WOD.

At the bottom of the page you can click on the archives to see a year's worth of words, with links. It looks like anything older than a year disappears each day.

The website Online Free Spanish also has a WOD, directed towards younger learners. When you open the page your WOD will be read to you, very slowly, along with the sample sentence. You can either choose the reply symbol to have it read again, or the lines, which stand for archive, to see previous words.

The number 2009 at the top of the archive page makes me think that this WOD only ran for that year. The graphics effects might help to motivate kids learning Spanish. I don't see any ways to have this WOD sent to you, which makes sense if it was really discontinued after 2009. The rest of the site is very much for younger learners....perhaps to replace the Spanish classes that no longer seem to be offered to grade school children in public schools.

Lexisrex has a Word of the Day, an Advanced Word of the Day, a Phrase of the Day and a Sentence of the Day, but there are few sample sentences and the archives only go back for 10 days, with no links to earlier ones. The definitions seem to be pulled off of a dictionary, in a way that you may see a sentence, but the translations underneath will include every possible translation of each word. There is something to be learned here, but not necessarily the WOD.....There are some word games on this site that I will explore later.

Here are the multiple dictionary definitions:

Transparent.com, a professional language teaching website, has a WOD page. The WOD comes from some other source online because I have seen it elsewhere; I believe it is just embedded in this site. You can scroll through the WODs, page by page, but there is no archive list. You can subscribe via email or RSS feed or find on Twitter. The words and their definitions tend to be simple and short; words that add to vocabulary but not to general understanding of language concepts. The sample sentences are very direct and brief.

Innovative Language, Spanish version, another commercial language learning program, also has a WOD, which it will happily send to your email. The word is the same as on Transparent.com, so both are pulling a feed off of a third site.

123Teachme.com has a Word of the Day, plus a link to archives, Phrase (or Idiom) of the Day and a Verb of the Day, defined and fully conjugated. It's nice to have the idiomatic expressions because you often won't quite understand them by only knowing the definition of the main word. You can subscribe to these daily lists. through RSS feed, twitter and email. When you are all worded out this site apparently has a lot of language learning games, though that will be a matter for a future post.

Your basic WOD:

The archives only go back a few months as of January 2016, either because the older months rotate out or this is a fairly young feature of the site.

Idiom or Phrase of the Day. A bit more fun.

Again, the archives do not go back too far. These are idiomatic expressions and not proverbs or folk sayings.

Don Quijote's Spanish WOD is the Roles Royce of WOD sites. First you have the word, it's etymology, meaning and category. These words are created by teachers in the Don Quijote program and are grouped into general subject categories so that you can study related words.

If you click on the highlighted Topic link below the word you get a page with basic definitions of all the related words.

The archives are quite extensive and you can either browse them by topics or by individual word.

As you can see, there are many words that have been covered over the time this feature has been running.

Don Quijote is the only Word of the Day type website that invites me to become as distracted as the best of the dictionary sites do. Still, I also like Spanish Dictionary's WOD, which I covered first. I'm not sure if Don Quijote delivers to email or posts to Twitter. They have links to those things but it might not be specifically for a WOD.

I doubt that any Word of the Day program will enable us to master another language. There is often a lot of context missing and the more subtle words, ones used on a lot of occasions but less easy to describe, probably don't get offered this way. And I'm wondering if learning a lot of words that don't connect to each other will be as helpful as learning the set of words needed to understand a particular short story or the set of words required to describe a process that is important to one of your favorite hobbies. But it is a painless way to keep the language in your mind at least for a moment each day.

A website called appcrawler also has a list of suggestions for best Android phone WOD sites and for i-phone WOD sites, among others. I have not investigated the Android yet and don't have an i-phone. I would imagine for most of us a phone based WOD would be ideal because the notifications would follow us everywhere.

Here are some of the things I looked for when examining a WOD site: is the website usable and currently maintained, what media notifications are possible, are the archives visible, extensive and searchable, what are the sample sentences like, what age group will the WOD appeal to.

Related to WOD sites are those with vocabulary lists organized by topic or other characteristics, though Don Quijote is really both things at once. This will be a topic for another day or two. I'm about worded out for the evening....