The Wordsmyth Word Explorer Children’s Dictionary Suite is written for children in the upper elementary grades and in middle school. It contains two levels:
- The Elementary Children’s Dictionary, written specifically for children in grades 3 to 5, defines words in a simple, full-sentence style that explains word-meaning to kids. It’s full of easy-to-understand definitions, child-friendly example sentences, illustrations, and photos.
- The Intermediate Children’s Dictionary is for grades 6 to 8. With over 14,000 entries, it covers even more of the most important words that children need to know, with support for a wide range of topics from science and social studies to emotions and everyday life.
You can choose either level as the default for your students.
The Children’s Dictionary Suite also contains a hidden advanced level, which satisfies the needs of the most curious and advanced students. The Wordsmyth Advanced Dictionary includes 60,000 entries. If a word is not found in either of the Children’s levels, the entry from the Advanced Dictionary will become available, regardless of the default level chosen for the Children’s Suite. Inappropriate entries for children are blocked by the Parental Filter.
A feature that was developed expressly for this dictionary is the Word Explorer. The Word Explorer is a word-finding and knowledge-exploration feature that allows a child to find words that are associated with particular topics designated by “keywords,” so, for example, under the keyword “art,” the child can find words for types of art, people who make art, things used in art, places where art can be found, as well as many other types of categories. Some other examples of keywords are “language,” “tool,” “exercise,” “water,” “transportation,” “religion,” “technology,” and “culture.” Words chosen to be keywords are words that relate to general areas of knowledge and enter into numerous relations with other words. The list of Word Explorer keywords can be found in the dropdown menu under “Word Exploration.”
All headwords in the Intermediate Children’s Dictionary, as well as all the example sentences for headwords, have been translated into Spanish and Chinese. (Note also that each sense of every headword is individually translated.) These translations are available to our subscribers and appear in the entries when the feature is selected by the user. (Headword translations for Spanish and Chinese also appear in the other Wordsmyth dictionaries for these same words.)
Also developed for the Children’s Dictionary Suite were the Word History feature and Language Notes feature. These appear at the bottom of selected entries and give information about a word’s development over time or information that helps the user understand how the word is correctly used or how it may be different from other words that are similar. Certain entries also contain Homophone Notes that alert the user to the fact that the word they looked up (e.g., “bore”) sounds the same but has a different meaning from another word (“boar”).
Just as in our advanced level dictionary, the Wordsmyth Educational Dictionary-Thesaurus, the Word Explorer Children’s Dictionary contains a thesaurus that is built right into it. That is, synonyms, antonyms, and similar words are matched with the appropriate senses of each headword rather than shown as a single pot of words attached to the headword itself. Another great feature of the thesaurus is that the words are linked with their own entries so that one click on a synonym, for example, will let a child view the meaning of that synonym in that word’s own entry. Going back to the original entry is as simple as an additional click.