Q: Think of a word that means “To reconcile or help settle”. Add a “T” somewhere to that word to get another word that means “To reflect, ponder, or contemplate”.

Show Answer ▼

That was the only answer I couldn’t find in today’s Sporcle quiz. I coulda been a contenda!

What is Sporcle? Don’t bother clicking – if you do, you’ll be sucked into one of the most compelling time-sinks the internet has ever cooked up.

Simply put, Sporcle is an online trivia quiz site – new quizzes are posted every day. There is seemingly no topic that Sporcle doesn’t touch: at random, I found these:

• Things in the song “If I Had a Million Dollars” (Barenaked Ladies)
• Songs with “Of” in the Title
• One-Word Hitchcock Movie Titles
• Mythological Punishments
• Name All of the Schools in the Major NCAA Conferences
• Batman Villains
• Florida Cities by Population
• Retired Hurricane Names Per Letter
• Things Meat Loaf Won’t Do for Love
• And, of course, Methods of Execution

The cool part of all of this is that not only are there fun quizzes and leaderboards and the usual social networking features, but you can also create your own quizzes. Just in case there isn’t already a quiz on your particular area of expertise.

Stuck on a puzzle that requires you to become a codebreaker? The Secret Code Breaker can help. The site provides a number of free codebreaking tools that I’ve found far more useful in some circumstances than many other online tools.

One of the most useful ones is the Monoalphabetic Substitution Cipher Solver – while there are many cryptogram solvers available on the web already, this one has the ability to solve cryptograms when the spaces are removed.

There is a wonderful library of tools useful in cracking classical ciphers available at rumkin.com. This is typically the first place I go when trying to solve a puzzle that involves cracking a cipher.

If you enjoy wordplay (and, frankly, who doesn’t?), then you’ll love the National Puzzlers League. The NPL is a self-described eclectic crowd who enjoy all forms of wordplay and are continuing the traditions of “The World’s Oldest Puzzlers’ Organization”.