Are you in?

[Velvet Ropes in Storage

Photo by, and licensed from, ..its.magic...


We’ve taken down some of the velvet ropes and are approving user logins again — almost everyone should now be approved within forty-eight hours after signing up. (If you share a name with someone who beat us up in middle school, your login approval may take longer. Possibly much longer.)


We are still requiring logins for a while longer, though, so that we can make sure we can handle the traffic.


Got questions? Leave a comment or email us!

Birdie Num Num

Yesterday chandas tweeted one of the more technically awkward web pages I’ve seen in a while, but the content is great. It appears to be a rather large dictionary of bird names, saved as a single html page from a Microsoft Word file. It’s all text with no images or links, there’s no obvious indication of who wrote or compiled it (it’s hosted on the Weisblum Lab Antibiotics Webpage, where it’s linked to as “Arthur Smith’s Bird Dictionary”), and it weighs in at a browser-crashing 12 MB.

Once you get past that it’s chockablock with good stuff—bird names and their synonyms starting with Aasvogel (“the name for the larger vultures by the Dutch colonists in Africa”) and ending with Zeldonia, the generic name for the Wrenthrush. The whole thing is a good potential source for some of the better bird lists on Wordie.

UPDATE: This one must be making the rounds. Language Hat blogged it a few days ago.

Beautiful Libraries

A little Friday fantasia: in September of 2007 Curious Expeditions collected dozens of pictures of stunning old libraries in a post titled Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries, which was just sent to me by my old pal Magnolia. They’re incredible.

I’ve spent my entire life surrounded either by clean-lined modernism or an almost equally spare New England aesthetic, and it’s startling to be reminded that baroque and rococo (barococo?) confections like this were ever built, let alone on this scale and in such profusion. Likewise, information is now so ubiquitous, and incorporeal, and cheap, it’s jolting to think of a time when it was rare, and heavy, and expensive, and so justified the building of palaces like this to contain it.

Curious Expeditions says they’ll leave it to someone else to post a list of beautiful modern libraries, like Louis Kahn’s library at Exeter. If anyone knows of one, please let us know in the comments.

We’re almost there …

Photo by, and licensed from, Macieksz.


Hi folks! Some of you may have noticed that we have put our home page back up, and are letting you sign up for Wordnik user accounts again … we’re slowly handing out logins as we move towards launch.


Our hope is to be able to let everyone in by next Monday night. If that changes, we’ll post something here!


If you want instant notification, you could follow us on Twitter.


Thanks again for your interest in Wordnik!

Hi! We’re Wordnik! Nice to meet you!

Hi! Welcome to Wordnik!

Tenzing the kitten.

Wordnik is a new way to learn about words. Our goal — lofty as it sounds! — is to show you some information about every word in English. (We don’t have every word yet, but we’re working on it.)

At Wordnik, we believe:

  • the best way to learn how to use a word is to see how other people use it. So we’ll try to show you as many example sentences as we can find for each word.
  • information about how a word works is as important as what a word means—so we’ll show you how often you could expect to see a word, notes about where you might find a word, and how a word’s behavior has changed over time.
  • your feedback is important! So there are lots of ways for you to give us yours—you can add tags, suggest related words, point out new words for us, and leave us notes at any word!
  • sites about words should always be fun and never boring.

We’re still in closed beta, but we’ll be open to new users in just a little while — see you soon! Until then, please enjoy the adorable kitten at the top of this post.

The Morbid Language of Newspapers

BoingBoing has a short but sweet post (the comments are worth reading too), sent to me by harrisj and mentioned on Wordie by VanishedOne, about the death-tinged tone of journalism jargon. Beat, kill (sometimes for a fee), morgue, widow, orphan, slug, bullet. I’m guessing this stems more from the sometimes bleak nature of what journalists cover than the overwhelmingly bleak current state of the industry—these are old terms, after all. They might also have roots in the noirish self-image a lot of newspaper people have of themselves: secretly every jschool grad from the ‘burbs wishes he or she was Bogart in “Deadline U.S.A.

Some other good journalism lists on Wordie: newspaper names*, this one of tabloid phrases, and my own short list of tabloid headlines, which could use a shot in the arm**.

* Consistently the most common source of search traffic to the site.
** It’s an open list, so feel free.