The Big Dig

The Big Dig offers a series of morphemes that come from words for animals in Latin, Greek, Old and Middle English as well as other languages. By putting the morphemes together in combinations of two you can create new words for new animals, which you can then describe. The idea here is to get a sense of how etymology works: understanding that individual pieces of words have a history and a provenance.

How it works

• you will need to enter your name, to personalise the game
• the game has three areas of interaction, the buried word bones, joining of the word bones area and the completed words area
• the buried word bones have several categories of words, Spanish, Middle English, Old English, Latin, Greek and other. The game allows you to drag any two word bones from the buried word area to the joining word bones area
• once you have joined two word bones, you are asked to define the meaning of your work
• once you have defined the meaning of your word, it is stacked up in the completed words area
• when you click on finish the game will summarise your new names for creatures, showing the original animal name, the new meanings and the languages used

You can play the offline version of The Big Dig (pdf).