Chapter 6: Ten Web Resources to Try When You’re Stuck 379
box at the top of the home page lets you type in what you know (perhaps the
name of a film or an actor) and click “go.” What shows up is a laundry list of
info about that film, TV show, actor, or director.
For example, maybe you can’t recall the name of the actress who played Louise
Jefferson on the TV show The Jeffersons. If you type in “The Jeffersons,” one of
the many pieces of information that shows up is a cast list that identifies the
actress as Isabel Sanford.Infoplease World Atlas
If your world geography is rusty (and whose isn’t?), this site (www.infoplease.
com/atlas) offers an easy way to get reacquainted with countries and major
cities. The home page features a world atlas. Click on a continent to get a look at
its countries, and then click on a country to zoom in on its cities.
This site features lots of other handy tools as well, including lists of all the
oceans and seas in the world, the world’s highest mountains, and the languages
spoken in each country. Even if you aren’t stuck on a crossword clue, check
this site out just for the fun of it!Thesaurus
Often, a puzzle clue will ask you to figure out a synonym for a word. You can turn
to the thesaurus at http://www.thesaurus.com for help in that situation. Simply type
in the word that’s been given in the clue, click “Search,” and pore through the list
of results for words that match your length requirements. For example, say the
clue is “peevish.” Maybe you know that the eight-letter answer must begin with
CH, and you just can’t figure out what word would work. From the list of possibili-
ties on this site, you can identify two possibilities: “childish” and “churlish.”Google Translate
This Web site (www.translate.google.com) offers an easy way to translate
from English to another language or vice versa. On the home page, you find a
large box in which to type the word or phrase you need translated. Below the
box, you choose which language to translate from and which language to trans-
late to. Say you want to find out the French word for “bread,” for example. Type
in “bread” and set the translation from English to French. Click “Translate,” and
you get the word “pain.”