Free Rice

Free Rice ScoreInstead of chasing down video references in YouTube, you can expand your vocabulary for a good cause using FreeRice, all while remaining glued to the internet. The initial levels aren’t bad, but the game nicely adjusts to your level of vocabulary and, after a while, you’ll find yourself using educated guesses almost exclusively as they shovel words at you that you’ve never, ever seen before. The word list is maintained and expanded by a “team of professional lexicographers from the firm of Lexiteria”. There are 55 difficulty levels and you need to get three words in a row right in order to move to the next level. Get one wrong and you drop back down.

As you can see from the graphic, I maxed out at level 49, but had to donate quite a bit of rice to get there. There doesn’t seem to be a way to “beat” the game other than by actually learning vocabulary—in which case, you didn’t cheat, you learned by accident.