A curious, new, and thoroughly addictive game has seized the nation. Somehow, this one is all of the above, as well as educational and dedicated to a good cause. FreeRice (www.freerice.com) is a vocabulary-building game that asks users to define words, but with each correct definition, the United Nation’s World Food Programme donates 10 grains of rice to feed the starving. The cost of the rice is borne by the major brand-name advertisers — Toshiba, Radisson, Liz Claiborne and iTunes, to name a few — who pledge to pay for the amount of rice generated by the game’s users.

The game features a word with four definitions listed below. Clicking on the correct definition adds a few grains of rice to the graphic of a bowl on the right of the screen. The words range from the elementary to the recherche, and the program automatically adjusts its difficulty to challenge your vocabulary. Small ads at the bottom of the screen fund the rice donations, and a page keeps track of each day’s total grain count and the overall total raised.

Launched on Oct. 7, FreeRice is the brainchild of John Breen, a computer programmer from Bloomington, Ind., and the creator of thehungersite.com and Poverty.com. Breen entered all of the 10,000 definitions himself, reputedly after watching his son study for the SAT.

What a perfect situation. Or, as FreeRice would have it, a paradisiacal one. What do half of the country’s high schoolers spend their time on anyway? Studying for the SAT — namely, cramming vocabulary for the daunting verbal section. Most students here, perhaps, devoted themselves to this exercise with equal parts vigor and nausea.

It takes roughly 20,000 grains of rice to provide the necessary calories to sustain an adult for a single day. Disregarding the approximately three-second delay to refresh words, a single student could feed one person for one day with only 33 hours and 20 minutes of studying. That might seem like a lot, but it’s a safe assumption that there are plenty of neurotic high school students who devote even more time than that in attempts to boost their verbal scores.

But FreeRice is for everyone, not just those cramming for a meaningless test. It really is fun and addictive, and building vocabulary while indirectly helping alleviate hunger is as fulfilling as a bowl of rice is to a hungry child. About 25,000 people, mostly children, die of hunger every day. As of Nov. 24, a month and a half after FreeRice was launched, 3,664,079,450 grains had been donated. That’s enough to feed nearly 185,000 adults for a day.

Some clever users have utilized their programming skills to write 24-hour scripts that automatically play FreeRice, greatly increasing the amount of rice donated. The latest generation boasts dictionary databases and word dumps that remember correct definitions and, therefore, become continually “smarter.” These “ricebots” are currently still permitted and can feed an estimated eight people per day.

Given the corporate sponsorships, some have debated the legitimacy of the program and questioned whether the whole thing is a money-making scam, since the site’s Cost Per Action ads most likely bring in significant profits. The Web site does state that the site makes no money off of FreeRice. One blogger calculated that at 10 grains per click, 29,000 grains of rice per pound and good rice costing 70 cents, FreeRice donates somewhere around 20 cents for every 1,000 clicks. Nonetheless, the UN’s World Food Programme Web site proudly acknowledges its connection to FreeRice.

As well it should. FreeRice is the very kind of technologically innovative and socially conscientious endeavor that Stanford students have long sought. Breen profits while improving the world, and his entrepreneurship and ingenuity deserve our respect and reward. So put down this newspaper and put those stratospheric verbal SAT scores to work — it’s time to save the world, one grain at a time!