From: Anu Garg (words AT wordsmith.org)
Subject: Happy Birthday A.Word.A.Day!
Date: Mar 14, 1998

Once upon a time, on a certain March 14th the wordserver began its words odyssey. That was exactly a quadrennium ago. Four years is not a very long period except on the Internet. It is often said that a year in the life of the Internet is equivalent to seven years in real life. AWAD has grown a lot in these years -- it reaches over 100,000 people in more than 130 countries -- but what remains same is the fun spirit in which it was created.

To mark the fourth anniversary of AWAD, here is list of features that will appear in the "New and Improved" AWAD beginning next week:

• Better formatting of the definitions for increased readability
• Pronunciation information in plain ASCII format on the email postings
• Pronunciation information in the form of sound files on the Web site. These will be recorded in the voice of Stuti Garg (stutiATwordsmith.org) as opposed to the synthesized voice presently used.
• A new dictionary source, namely American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed. Thanks to Inso Corp. for the permission to use this dictionary in AWAD.
• A search engine on the Web site featuring full text index of AWAD archives and site search ( https://wordsmith.org/awad/search.html ).
• Revival of the weekly column AWADmail. For those who have not seen the previous issues ( https://wordsmith.org/awad/archives.html ), it is a compilation of feedback on AWAD postings that features selected responses from the linguaphiles, words related queries, and general comments.

It is also time to commend Todd J. Derr (tjdATwordsmith.org) for his systems wizardry, and Mark Hahn (hahnATwordsmith.org) for his network magic. Without their enthusiastic involvement AWAD would not be possible. And, a special thank-you goes to people on this list who share their love of words and languages -- this list is dedicated to all of you.

Here's to another four years of wordsmithing,
Anu