What is this?
This year I set a pointless goal for myself: to keep a list of every word I look up in the dictionary. I figure it will be a nice thing, at the year's end, to go back through the list and recall the words I've learned and the books I've read. This webpage, WWWoWWW, (Wonderful Words Weekly on the World Wide Web) is the respository for all words new to me in big 2026.
Why?
This is basically just me encouraging myself to get back into the good habit of reading more books and out of the bad habit of doom-scrolling; paying attention to individual words instead of a flow of slop. I wanted to make a website like the ones I enjoyed browsing a decade ago, exploring the hyperlinks of pointlessSites.com.
Sourcing the Definitions
Since I'm mostly just copying defintions, I'm sourcing most of them from public domain works. Right now that's the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Webster's 1913 Dictionary, and the 1911 Century Dictionary. This isn't perfect since obviously language has changed in the last hundred years. The people who wrote those definitions had their biasesFor example, the OED definition of "masturbation" is "The action or practice of self-abuse." —Not the way I do it, buddy.. Still, this usually works for me. Most of the words I look up, I'm looking up because they're dated. When the modern meaning of a word isn't included in the old sources, I'll add another sense to the definition with a footnote to a modern reference. At the end of the day, this is more stenography than lexicography; it's an achievement of boredom more than scholarship, but I'm trying to be reasonably thorough.
Webster's 1913 is searchable online here
The Century Dictionary is searchable here
OCR'd PDFs and EPUBs of the OED are collected in this collection at archive.org
A full list of references I've used is available here: References
Abbreviations
- adj. adjective
- C11 The Century Dictionary and Encyclopedia, 1911
- fig. figurative
- intr. intransitive verb
- n. noun
- OED1 The Oxford English Dictionary, first edition
- pass passive verb
- trans. transitive verb
- transf. transfered sense
- v. verb
- W13 Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913