Admit it: You always thought there wasn't any value to having a healthy vocabulary. "I needs me some threadz" and "Pardon me, good sir, prithy tell canst thou locate a haberdashery" pretty much mean the same thing. But now your vocabulary prowess has high stakes attached to it: The non-profit organization FreeRice has established an online word game where every word you guess correctly donates 20 grains of rice to a needy country.
When you get a vocabulary word correct, FreeRice uses advertising dollars on the site to buy 20 grains of rice; the hard-won rice is then distributed by the United Nations World Food Program to 75 countries. The site launched on Oct. 7 and has since donated 5,773,015,170 grains of rice. That may not seem like much, but that works out to about 199,069 1-lb. bags of super-tasty rice.
