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Welcome to Digsby Wyscher's
wwword-association game.

You can use the wwword-association game to:


While away a few minutes during a coffee break; test your vocabulary; gain insight into your unconscious psychological processes; use as a source for creative writing or, alternatively, share turns with friends and see how many consecutive responses you can get.





[Please use the links provided at the bottom of the page to navigate your way through the documentation]

Welcome to Digsby Wyscher's wwword association game.
Online Documentation - 1 - Introduction.

Psychiatrists and psychologist alike often play word association games with their patients or "clients" as a means of gaining access to hidden, unconscious mental processes. In most instances, patients are asked to respond to a selection of words suggested by their therapist, who in turn carefully chooses his or her words so as to lead the patient towards specific goals.

In the following example, the thread: baby = young, boy = child, earth = mother, brown = cow might suggest that the patient has a low opinion of his mother (although he is obviously being deliberately and rather heavy-handedly led to this conclusion by the professional). This technique can also be used as a general diagnostic tool.

As an alternative to this method, employed within the wwword-association game, a more subtle approach is required by the "professionals", who now play on the same terms as their patients, and are therefore under equal pressure to think of appropriate responses to their patients' words, without exposing their own inadequacies and hidden neuroses in the process.

The principle of the wwword-association game is straightforward - you suggest a word, the game supplies a new word as a response, you reply to this, and so on until you reach a point where either you or the computer are unable to respond. If the computer fails to supply a new response, it is because it either cannot recognise the previously submitted word, or it has no further replies other than those most recently used. On such occasions, you are prompted to enter a new word, which the game will store in its database for future use. As the game continues, database and hence vocabulary continues to expand as more and more word associations are collected. Although a small amount of administration is necessary (spelling, abuse etc), in general the quality of the wwword-association game is entirely dependent on the quality of the responses given by you, the user...

Welcome to Digsby Wyscher's wwword association game.
Online Documentation - 2 - Association Criteria.

In general, the way you answer says more about you that the individual words you use. Although the word association game is still in its infancy (in fact, it was only created in order to demonstrate some new concepts of web development), and at present does not offer any psychological analysis of your responses (hopefully, coming soon), you can still study trends in the way you answer the words given to you, and see if they might reflect something about your personality...

For example, do you answer positive and negative sounding words with synonyms or antonyms? If you tend to answer positives with synonyms, and negatives with antonyms, then that might suggest a positive outlook on life. For example, for black, you say white as opposed to either dark or night while, when presented with white, you say pale or brilliant, as opposed to black or dark.

The wwword-association engine uses many different sources to provide its answers: as well as employing obvious "word pairs" eg knife - fork, rock - solid, or crime - punishment, it also uses similar and opposite meanings (synonyms and antonyms), nomenclature and collective terms (eg bee = swarm, hive or apiary, as well as insect, honey, sting and spelling), aphorisms, euphemisms and colloquialisms, eponyms, puns and word play, snatches from famous verses and phrases (eg commandment = ten or kill or covet, or faith = hope = charity) as well as homophones and homonyms (eg wall = frieze = freeze = cold, or tent = canvas = canvass = vote) and some references which are slightly obscure eg swift (jonathan) = presto (his italian nickname) = hey (as in "hey, presto!") = jude (after the beatles) = obscure (as in jude the obscure)!

A more typical "circular" chain might run as follows:

cup - final - demand - supply - electricity - current - currant - fruit - apple - juice - drink - tea - cup

Welcome to Digsby Wyscher's wwword association game.
Online Documentation - 3 - Basic Guidelines for Entries.

The game is only capable of processing single words, and hence your entry will be submitted to the server whenever the space bar is pressed. Entries are also submitted by the return key.

No entry can exceed 20 characters - the page will reset your entry if you exceed this limit.

In the absence of a cursor, (i.e. when the page is making a server request), you are prevented from typing anything on the screen.

Please refrain from using proper names, plurals (eg use bee for bees, wolf for wolves), or tenses other than the present.
Please use the first person when suggesting a verb (eg [I] run, not [she] runs), or the past participle used in an adjectival sense (eg the words rest for stay, rested for fresh and charging for rhino are acceptable, but rests for arm and charges as opposed to charge for extra are not).

Before submitting a new entry into the database, please ensure that your entry has a genuine relationship with the word it is coupled to, and that it is spelt correctly - in English! This helps us considerably with database adminstration.

If you harbour any doubts about submitting a new word and wish to cancel your entry, then please click on the links provided in the new entry section. This helps to avoid polluting the database with unwelcome "visitors".