Watercress - the other superfood!

Yesterday, I found this website: http://www.watercress.co.uk/home/  about watercress and I think it's neat-o! I love the leafy green vegetable, watercress, for some reason and apparently they grow hoards of it in England. Although, when I buy it at the supermarket here the leaves don't look as big as they do in the pictures on this site.

They even have a watercress festival every year - in England - can you believe it? Here in the states there is practically a festival for every fruit you can imagine, but there are not too many spinach or kale festivals I am aware of. Anyway, apparently watercress has more calcium than milk, and more vitamin C than an Orange. It was eaten almost at every meal in Napoleon's estate and during the Victorian Ages it was sold in bunches like a giant green cotton candy out of vendors on the street - supposedly one of the first "foods on the go".  Perhaps I should have made my bridal bouquet out of it - hehe.

Where can I get the good stuff??

I bookmark way too many websites - I think this blog is a great way to weed out the really good ones from the maybes.

Dictionaires, Dictionaires, Word Dictionaires

There are many different kinds of dictionaries - there is probably a type of dictionary for any subject you can think of. (Law Dictionary, Medical Dictionary, Shakespeare Dictionary, Anthropology Dictionary, Theory Dictionaries...)

Until recently, I've always used the www.dictionary.com  to look up words while writing papers or anything for that matter and it is fine for a simple dictionary. However, I've discovered two more free online dictionary tools that I favor over my previous:

The first one is http://dictionary.cambridge.org/ , which is the Cambridge online dictionary. What I love about this dictionary is that is gives you a large supply of synonyms for your word as well as displaying them in visual form known as a "visual thesaurus." I also like that it gives you sentence with that word used in it.

 Cambridge's Visual Thesaurus

The second website I just learned about last night in class is www.onelook.com, which is called OneLook Dictionary Search. This website searches the internet (so you don't have to) for a multitude of online dictionaries to find ALL the meanings of the word you searched for. This is great if you want a comprehensive search of a word - meanings from multiple sources provide reliability as well giving you more ideas on how to use the word. It has this great feature that allows you to do a reverse look-up as well. That is quite neat - looking to find a single word when you have a group of words. This sounds perfect for writing poetry!


Since I was an English major in undergrad I knew about a fantastic resource called the Oxford English Dictionary. This comprehensive dictionary gives you the history of each word - in other words what is the oldest source of written works this word was used in. So it tells you the country of origin and older meanings of  the word and it gives you the paragraph or multiple paragraph of where it was first found. Unfortunately,  you have to be a subscriber to use it. Your public library might subscribe, which gives you the access too, but I am not sure how many do!!! If you are in college or work for a college than you most likely 99% of the time have access to it through your school libraries website,