Diurnal Word is a word-a-day app that has available from the Windows Store for some time now and recently made the jump to Windows 10. Diurnal offers a simple, easy to use design that delivers a boat load of words to your Windows 10 PC or Mobile device.
Much like a Word-a-Day Calendar, Diurnal includes words that range from those you have never heard of to those you use daily. Live Tile support makes it easy to expand your vocabulary and you can always explore previous words with a random selection feature.
Diurnal is regularly priced at $.99, but through the end of the month you can pick up Diurnal Word free (limited to Windows 10 devices). Diurnal Word may not be an app that you visit more than once a day, but it is a simple way to learn something new.
The layout of Diurnal Word is about as simple as it can get. The main display for the Windows 10 app has your word of the day, complete with definitions and examples using the word. Along the bottom of the screen are button controls to tag a word as a favorite and share the word using universal share options (messaging, email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.).
There is a drop down menu button in the upper left corner of Diurnal Word's main page that holds options to view previous days' words, use the random word feature, view your favorite words, view the About screen and access the settings. Diurnal Word's settings include options to turn on/off the phone status bar (the bar at the top of the screen that shows wireless signal, battery level, etc.) and turn on/off the app's Live Tile.
You can scroll back by calendar date to view other Diurnal words and the random word feature generates a collection of words picked at random from the entire date range. This feature can deliver words used last week, last month or a few years ago.
Again these words range in nature from the obscure words that you may never have heard of to those that are more common and used daily. One day you may find "nimrod" (a 'skillful hunter' or an 'inept person', depending on your locale) featured and the next you get 'rapscallion' (a mischievous person). One neat feature of Diurnal Word is the ability to highlight a word used in the definition and get the definition of that word a pop-up. So if 'unclubbable' is used in a definition, you can tap on it to see its definition (which would be 'unsociable' as in somebody you would not want to invite to your club, not something unable to be struck by a blunt object).
All in all, I found Diurnal Word to be a simple, easy to use Windows 10 app that provides the opportunity to expand your vocabulary and learn something new. It may not be the flashiest app in the Windows Store, but sometimes the simpler, the better.
Download Diurnal Word from the Windows Store
