Category Archives: Twitter

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WotD Perfect Tweets Roundup

Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from this week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh.  Here are our favorites from this week.

Thanks to everyone for playing! You’ll have a chance next week to perfect your word of the day perfect tweets again. To get the word of the day, just follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe via email.

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The WotD Perfect Tweet

Today we’ll be launching a new weekly challenge for our Twitter followers.

Use any word of the day (WotD) from this week in a sentence that best demonstrates its meaning in context. However, your sentence must be no longer than 140 characters – in other words, a perfect tweet!  Send us the link to your tweet via Twitter, and at the end of the week, we’ll pick our favorites and feature them on our blog.

What do we mean by “meaning in context”?  We mean show the word in action instead of simply repeating the definition.  For example, the definition for today’s WotD, lorette, is:

a name for a woman who is supported by her lovers, and devotes herself to idleness, show, and pleasure; — so called from the church of Notre Dame de Lorette, in Paris, near which many of them resided.

A sentence demonstrating its meaning is:

Aurore’s mother seems to us, du reste, the perfect type of a Parisian lorette, the sort of woman so keenly attractive with the bloom of youth and the eloquence of passion, — but when these have passed their day, the most detestable of mistresses, the most undesirable of companions.

Of course this sentence is far too long for a tweet. 🙂

How can you keep up with all the Words of the Day?  Follow us on Twitter or subscribe by email.  (Or both!)

The rules again:

  • Use any Word of the Day from this week in a sentence
  • @ us the link to your tweet (presuming you don’t want “@wordnik” taking up your 140 character limit)
  • We’ll feature our favorites on our blog on Friday the following Monday
  • No hash tag necessary

We look forward to seeing your perfect WotD tweets!

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Getting Back on the Bike

So, I’ve been the worst blogger ever. Got my head turned by Twitter, other parts of life flared up, and next thing I know I haven’t posted to Errata in over four months.

This is a tentative step towards getting back on the bike. I spent this weekend refactoring some of the innards of poor neglected Wordie. The results of this ongoing effort will be largely invisible, and mostly for my own benefit–some of the internals were written in such haste that now, months or years later, what’s going on under the hood is a little hazy, even to me. So I’m reorganizing internals*, fixing a few longstanding bugs, and along the way hopefully improving performance, to handle the slow, steady increase in traffic Wordie continues to see. Once I’ve cleaned house I’ll be in a much better position to start adding some new features.

One small feature you can see right now is a new link to Forvo.com under each word. Forvo is sort of like Wordie–user submitted words–but it focuses on audio pronunciations, rather than, uh, whatever it is that Wordie focuses on. Click the last little square under antipodes for an example. It’ll bring you to a page on Forvo where you can hear the proper Canadian pronunciation of the word.

* For those who care, I’m also bolting on, after the fact, a proper test suite, having recently gotten the TDD religion.