I’m going out on a limb here and guessing that numbers geeks, engineers, and scientists have been flocking to Wolfram Alpha ever since its release on May 18. But after watching their introductory screencast, I found that it’s got offerings for word and language enthusiasts as well.
For example, let’s say you need to write a paper in the range of 15000 words. If you enter that figure into Wolfram Alpha it computes the number into both single-spaced and double-spaced page equivalents;
… or … if you were writing a paper on the history of the English language (a standard course offering in English Dept graduate programs) and needed to know the background on prepositions; if you entered prepositions into Wolfram Alpha, one of the results you’d see would be its first recorded use: 1388 or 621 years ago. To check the credibility of this data, you could also click the Source Information link and see that Princeton University’s WordNet, among others, was one of the references.
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Wolfram Alpha, WordNet