More Cool Tools

This site Dictionary.hm, is noteworthy for a couple of reasons.

First, it's a highly interactive dictionary--simply start typing a word, such as cancer, and defintions appear on the screen. Type C and an explanation of the letter shows up; continue typing to "can" and the verb and nouns are defined, and then finally "cancer". It is very speedy, much faster than the annoying dictionary.com

The site is definitely fun and different. To find out something about the site's operators, type in "about us" in the defintion area and wham, you get this:
Founded in 2006, Dictionary.hm holds a searchable database of over 175,000 non-taboo definitions and growing. We aim to be the most used online dictionary on the internet, and hope to bring extra features as soon as they come available to us. Dictionary.hm is © copyright Colin Palmer as of 2006 to present day. All rights reserved.

Second is its top-level domain name (the .hm part). After scouring around for a while, I found a British newspaper article complaining about it because, it says, the domain belongs to the Heard and McDonald Islands, which are "situated about 1,500 km north of Antarctica, 4,100 km south-west of Australia, and about 4,700 km south-east of Africa." So, no one's really there, which makes you wonder why bother with the unexciting TLD name, other than to capture the coveted "dictionary" part of the address.

It sounds as if the site is still developing, since 175,000 words in the database isn't all that extensive. But it seems to have made a great start and I'm looking forward to seeing where it will go next.