Ruby on Rails

Grad Students Redefine Easy Money With $1-a-Letter Web Site

Ready to taste envy? To burn with regret? Meet Paddy Donnelly and Lee Munroe. They're selling words at a buck per letter. Donnelly, 22, and Munroe, 23 — graduate students at the University of Ulster-Belfast — dreamed up the Big Word Project while brainstorming a mass collaboration Web site that would let Donnelly use his viral marketing ideas and Munroe hone his Ruby on Rails skills.

"Words mean different things to different people," Donnelly says, "so we thought, why not let people redefine them?" When you buy a word on thebigwordproject.com, you can link that term from the dictionary-like site to any other site, which then becomes the word's new "definition." It's also a cheap way to place an ad — granted to a limited audience of word nerds. (Pheasants points to the River Hills Lodge, offering some of the finest wingshooting in South Dakota.) Or to just be cute. (Irony leads to microsoft.com/products/works.)

It's reminiscent of the Million Dollar Homepage, which sold a million pixels for $1 a pop. But with nearly all 291,500 Oxford English Dictionary entries in inventory — plus verb forms, plural nouns, comparatives, superlatives, and American spellings — Donnelly and Munroe estimate they could do half a million better.

Two weeks after launch, the duo had unloaded more than 2,000 words, from a ($1) to zyzzyva ($7). Munroe says the cash is a great help in alleviating a problem most current and former students can relate to: "We're in a lot of debt." Word. Ready to taste envy? To burn with regret? Meet Paddy Donnelly and Lee Munroe. They're selling words at a buck per letter. Donnelly, 22... more

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