By Francis Moran

Who’d have thunk that my self-professed word nerdiness could come together with my social conscience on a single web site with a terribly addictive premise?

Well, in the world of the web, all mash-ups are possible, and the quirky but fascinating site Free Rice manages to marry these seemingly disparate interests of mine with a little game that sees rice donated to feed hungry people with every correct answer visitors give to a vocabulary question. For every word you get right, the site’s backers donate 20 grains of rice through the United Nations World Food Program to help feed hungry people. The money to buy the rice is generated through banner ads on the site.

Twenty grains of rice doesn’t sound like much, but since launching the site in October 2007, Free Rice has donated more than 41 billion grains of rice to people in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Uganda, Nepal, Bhutan and Myanmar. That’s an amount approaching 900 metric tonnes of rice!

And the game is dangerously addictive. You rise through levels as you play, climbing one level every time you correctly answer three questions in a row. Get one wrong, though, and you slip down a level. A little counter at the bottom tracks your progress. I got to level 48 before having to quit yesterday evening so I could join my family in that other highly addictive current preoccupation, the Olympics.

(I am indebted — I think! — to Nicole Ferraro over at Internet Evolution for bringing this site to my attention. I am afraid, Nicole, to go anywhere near the other great time-wasters you list…!)

Technorati Tags: vocabulary, hunger, feed the world, Free Rice