THE TALLMANIA WEB DIRECTORY: ARTS & LITERATURE
For bookworms & art lovers.
The Reference Shelf:
How many dictionaries do you need? How about 700 or so. Take a look at One Look Dictionaries, where you will definitely find any kind of word, scientific, sports term, religious terms, technological, slang, etc., etc., etc. If it exists, a dictionary is here for it.
Speaking of dictionaries...for absolute word junkies, how about a dictionary where you type in the word, and then every single word in the definition is also clickable to find its definition. You could spend approximately the rest of your life at the HyperDictionary, if you wanted to.
For a dictionary and thesaurus that is easy to use, try Wordsmyth.
Looking for a dictionary/thesaurus/telephone book/CIA Factbook/quotation/atlas? It's at Research It!, with a lot of other stuff, too.
Want some help with that crossword puzzle? Or your Scrabble game? How about a Pig Latin dictionary? Or a dictionary that will scramble your letters up to form new words? Still more dictionaries are at Langenberg.
One of the best sites is the oldest, the Quotations Page. Check them out to search for quotes, who said it, browse by subject, etc.
Who SAID it? Type in the phrase here at Bartleby, and let your computer search their quotation books.
Or, type it into Find-A-Quotation, and search a bunch of quote sites and search engines at once.
To FIND a good quotation by browsing a topic, try Quoteland
Word Games:
I bet you'll find even the third grade words tough at Fake Out, where you have to pick the right definition for the word. You can also write some fake definitions, and then check back later and see how many people were fooled and chose your fake one.
An unusual collection of games and strange lists and facts is to be found at the English Zone.
The Wacky World of Words is just what you'd think--challenges and games all dealing with the way words work.
What's an anagram? a spoonerism? a palindrome? If you want to have fun with words, well then I suggest Fun-With-Words.Com, where you'll find puzzles, but also learn different odd and interesting things about words, like some tongue twisters and other tricks.
Enter the hallway at Word Central, and click around the schoolhouse to discover some interesting things about words, and even write a song in the Music Room.
Games & Puzzles of All Sorts:
Yowza! Spend about a thousand hours with the Brain Boosters--logic, math, reasoning, word games, and riddles--at DiscoverySchool.com.
Look at all the quizzes, tests, puzzles, and other things at this site with the ugly name of Puzz.com.
This one is NOT games you play on the Internet; it's full of games you play with paper and pencil, coins, or other items. You can learn the games by reading the page, and then play them later (not in class!). Clever Games For Clever People
Choose from brain teasers, games, and optical illusions at Brain Bashers.
The games at Fun Brain are often a bit easy, but sometimes it's nice to get all the answers right.
One of my favorite puzzle sites is Useless Knowledge, which is just what it sounds like. Quizzes, quotes, lists of famous left-handed people, phobias, saints, and any other useless thing you can think of. You can spend about 10,000 hours browsing around here.
Buying Books in English:
Try our friends at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, and help the classroom bookshelf at the same time.
Don't you love the drawings of M.C. Escher? If you don't, you should, and the National Gallery of Art in the US is an excellent place to start.
"I'd rather be anywhere--anywhere, but this art museum..." A weird but interesting journey into paint and paintings starts with a boring trip to an art museum. Inside Art takes you, uh, inside art--but not exactly as you might think. An excellent idea for a site.
A. Pintura, Art Detective cracks the case when it comes to valuable paintings, forgeries, fakes, thefts, and other matters related to art and artists.
If you're looking for art and artists on the Internet, you're looking for the Artcyclopedia, a search engine for art.
Books & Literature @ Random:
Who has time to actually read books any more? The folks at Book-a-Minute know the problem. They've boiled down hundreds of books, from Shakespeare to Stephen King, into funny bite-sized morsels.
Did you ever wonder what would happen if you took a sentence in English, translated it into French, and then translated that French back into English? No? Well, it can sound a bit funny. You can do that, for English, French, and lots of other languages, at the Lost in Translation site. It's worth a few minutes of amusement.
If you have logizomechaniphobia, don't go to The Phobia List!! (Logizomechaniphobia, by the way, is a fear of computers.) A useless, but still sometimes interesting, list.
What does your first name mean? You can probably find out at Behind the Name. Although it mainly indexes names from North America, England, and Western Europe, it may have yours, even if your name is from somewhere else.
Haven't found what you're looking for? Try the Open Directory Project: