TWO ENTERPRISING Belfast postgraduate students have paid their college fees and are clearing their student loans with revenues from their website which allows people to "redefine" words in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The Big Word Project (www.thebigwordproject.com) sells words at a dollar a letter and the new owner can then link it to a web-page of their choosing. Paddy Donnelly and Lee Munroe, who are studying multi-disciplinary design at the University of Ulster, have sold more than 4,500 words through the site.

Initially the students committed to keeping The Big Word Project online for five years but such has been its success that it will run past 2013. The site was the product of a brainstorming session for one of their postgraduate projects. Mr Munroe developed the site in four weeks using the open source web programming language Ruby on Rails.

Mr Donnelly concentrated on viral marketing of the site which has largely focused on getting the word out to influential bloggers. Just days after the project went live, it was covered on the popular Daring Fireball blog which generated a huge surge in traffic and hundreds of e-mails from interested customers.

"We live in a share house together and Lee woke up at 5am and saw all these e-mails coming in," says Mr Donnelly. "We got up and started answering them. Since then over 300 blogs have written about it."

Currently the site lists all 291,500 words in the Oxford English Dictionary. No proper names or place names are available but the pair say they will consider reasonable requests for words that may not currently be in the database.

Although visitors have come from more than 120 countries, the bulk of sales have been to the US. As well as to company websites, links are pointing to Bebo and My Space profile pages, pictures on Flickr, and blogs. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, the longest word in the dictionary, has also been sold, netting the site owners a nice $45.