Ninjawords.com is Awesome

I like words a lot. A whole lot. And when I find a list of cool new words, I get excited (www.wordie.com). What's better than a list of new words? A really fast, high quality dictionary.

Check out http://www.ninjawords.com. It kicks some serious butt. Here's the top 11 reasons that come to mind about why this incredibly cool online dictionary rocks my and inevitably your proverbial socks clean off.

1) It is fast. And by fast I mean riding a shopping cart full of bottled water down the aisle in Costco and full speed fast. It's written with Ruby on Rails and implements a really clean design that brings results up quick. When you request a definition, it doesn't have to reload the whole page, just the info you need. And, with the exception of the logo it's all text. No ads, no needless images, no redirected content.
The net result: wicked fast.

2) You can add it to Firefox's search window. Just pull down the search window while you're on ninjawords.com, and you can add it. This means when you're reading a book and don't know what a word means, you can just open up old Lappy, type the word into the search bar and there she blows, a definition.

3) Once it's added to the Firefox search, you can highlight a word on any web page and right click to the definition.

4) Built in spell check, which for me is a necessity. I believe it is using Google's spell check API, but I could be wrong on that. (Interestingly enough, My Firefox spell check add on is marking "Google's," "Firefox," and "API" as mispelled words.) In any case, the NinjaWords spell check works really well.

5) Many of the words come with synonyms, just in case you're too pompous to use the word that come to mind.

6) Related words show up as links, which will add another definition to the page you are already looking at. This means you can compare multiple definitions all at once.

7) Speaking of which, you can even put multiple words in separated by commas and get a comparative definition for all the words.

8) You can search straight from your address bar. For example, if you put in www.ninjawords.com/comma,coma you get a definition for the punctuation mark and one for the state of deep sleep.

9) Spartan yet clean and functional styling.

10) It keeps a running list of words you've looked up.

11) Random word picker - for when the OED or dictionary.com word of the day blows giant uninteresting chunks.

In short, I love this dictionary -- and that's coming from someone with access to the Unabridged OED online.