National Puzzlers' League
If you're into cryptic crosswords and their ilk, I heartily recommend
you join the NPL.
It's a group of people dedicated to playing with English,
and joining gets you a monthly publication, the Enigma, full
of puzzles and discussion.
You can read a
sample issue of the
Enigma. There's also information about
how to join.
If you're in a truly bizarre mood, you can look at the
NPL "tree",
which contains
a list of members with noms (with more information about some) and a
graph with no directed cycles indicating who recruited whom for the
league.
Computer-aided Solving
There is a useful online dictionary that can aid in puzzle solving:
a version of
Webster's
Second New International Dictionary, a pair of wordlists (one of
words, one of phrases) entered by the Air Force that contain most of
Merriam-Webster's NI2. The dictionary is available at many sites. The
site this link points to,
coast.cs.purdue.edu,
contains a number of other wordlists. (At the moment, this site is
down. I don't know if this is permanent.)
When I was in college, I wrote a couple of short programs to help
me scan through these wordlists. I make no promises about their
efficiency or reliability, but they're fairly simple and easy to use.
If you have other pointers to wordlists and/or code, I'd be interested
in finding out about it. E-mail me at
kutin@math.uchicago.edu.