Friday, June 26, 2009

Using GoogleBattle for Better Word Choice

Have you ever been bewildered on which synonymous word you would choose in your writing?
Is it spacious or large? Enormous or gigantic? Splendid or wondrous? All of these and much more are synonymous words that you might know but you do not know which one is more often used. If you are writing in a website,a blog, or even doing composing an academic essay, you have to use googlebattle to help you find out which word is more used on the WWW.

Using googlebattle
The name says it all. It is a battle between two words in the google search engine. The word that wins will be the lucky one to be chosen in your writing. You simply type in each word in its keyword text area (keyword1 and keyword2) then click "go" as shown in the images below.

After you enter each word, you click " go" which result in have a smiley face for the winner word and a frowning face for the losing word. If you scroll down you will see how many times each word is used on the WWW as recorded by google search engine.
Let's say , for example. that I want to choose between the two words : loquacious and garrulous.
I enter each word and hit "go'




The number of times each word appears is also shown.



But remember, not every two synonyms can be used properly in the same context. Some words are not used often as their synonyms but might be more powerful in certain contexts, conveying a clearer meaning.
Try some of the words that you were baffled of choosing between and share your results in the comments. I will be glad to hear how this is evolving. Go to googlebattle and check it out.
Best
Ammar

2 comments:

  1. I love this idea for enhancing vocabulary. I am an English teacher as well, and this will be great to use when teaching about word choice. We are studying about derivatives, synonyms, antonyms, their parts of speech, etc., and I am always looking for fun ways to do this. By the way, great blog!!

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  2. Thanks Mr.s Trefz for your comment. Actually I ceased posting on this blog for a while now as you can c to focus on other teaching issues, but I will be back to posting here.
    There are gr8 tools out there that you can harness their power for English language learning. You can follow my other blog that targets language teachers, English teachers in particular, at http://call4teachers.blogspot.com .
    Thanks 4 sharing :)

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