Free Rice = a Bigger Vocabulary

What if I told you that you could increase your vocabulary and, as a result, cure world hunger? Would you assume I'm being mendacious? Probably not. But if you did, I'd know what you were talking about and I'd tell you that you had made an egregious mistake.

For the past couple of days, I've been killing some time on the website, Free Rice. The concept is simple. The site shows you a word and four possible definitions and/or synonyms. You pick the one that most closely matches. You then find out if you were right or wrong and, if you were wrong, what the correct definition is. In the meantime, you've just generated a donation of 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. The funding comes from some simple advertising on the site.

While 10 grains of rice may not seem like much, it adds up quickly, especially if you find this website as addictive as I do. While you're plugging along, the site is keeping track of your vocab level. For each word you get wrong, the level drops by one. It takes three correct answers to go back up. The higher your level, the more difficult the words. There are 50 vocab levels to master and I keep trying to raise my score bit by bit. I have donated 6,730 grains of rice in the process. I have no idea how many grains it takes to make a decent portion, but maybe I've got a few meals in there. Since the site went live on October 7, 2007, more than 1.3 billion grains of rice have been donated!

In case it's bugging you, "mendacious" basically means "dishonest." As for "egregious," it should be a bit more familiar. It means outrageously bad, although you probably won't find that particular definition in any dictionary.

Do you know what "panjandrum" means? Opprobrious? Mulct? If not, it's time to learn. Extra points if you come back and leave a comment using one of the more challenging words from Free Rice in a sentence. * Extra points are really just for fun!