As I came across this device, I was reminiscing about my school days when we kids would lug a thick, mean-looking Webster's dictionary to our English classes. And the bigger the dictionary, the more respect the proud owner would command, which in turn would set off a fierce competition among kids to refresh their dictionary supplies with many different variants, all in order to get into the good books of the professors. Perhaps I would seem like a dinosaur if I were to share the memories with the digital generation of the present. To get to the point, the device that triggered these memories is the Merriam Webster's USB-based Dictionary & Thesaurus.

The 256MB flash drive contains the Webster's digital dictionary with 300,000 words and an accompanying thesaurus with 500,000 words. A portion of the drive is also allocated for other pre-loaded software programs such as phonetic spell correction, a grammar guide and confusable function alerts - a facility by which the software will alert the user if he might have mistaken similar sounding words (e.g bore and boar).The remaining memory can be used for normal data storage - the specification doesn't say how much of the memory is left, though.

Available for $49.95 at Franklin.

Via Everything USB.