Tag Archives: announcements

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Wordnik’s Word Pages: now with 86.5% more resplendence

We’re happy to announce today a new look for the (millions and millions of) Wordnik word pages:

The new pages are cleaner, easier to navigate and read, more colorful, and have been shown in controlled, double-blind experiments to increase the love of words, writing and speaking skills, and vocabulary retention by up to 115% in test subjects*.

New features include an expanded Related Word (thesaurus) section, with a new “Reverse Dictionary” section:

screenshot of related words at "better"

Word pages now include list previews, so you can easily see information about the lists that include the word you’ve looked up:

We’ll be rolling out more improvements and more new features across all of Wordnik.com over the next few weeks. As always, you can send us your thoughts via feedback@wordnik.com or by leaving a comment here.

[*test subjects may or may not have been Wordnik employees and their families.]

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Spring News from Wordnik

in just-spring

Photo by, and licensed (CC BY-NC 2.0) from, cuellar.

Spring is always a time for new growth, and we’re certainly growing here at Wordnik!

Some new stuff we think you’d like:

  • We now have a beta mobile site at http://m.wordnik.com, optimized for small-screen devices.
  • We have more new (and better!) example sentences, from new sources, with more on the way soon.
  • Check out our improved word frequency charts!
  • The Wordnik Word of the Day is now available as a daily email. You can sign up for it now by logging in to Wordnik and editing your preferences.
  • Our new autoexpanding comment areas make it easier to write and edit comments of more than a few lines (for when you have a lot to say about a particular word).
  • You’ll find improved definition data from the GNU Webster’s 1913 dictionary, available both on the site and through the API.
  • Developers, check out the New API calls for retrieving examples, related words (synonyms, antonyms, and the like), phrases, and definitions by part of speech. Support for JSONP is now available as well.
  • Our corpus is now using mongodb under the hood, providing improved performance now, and interesting feature possibilities down the road.
  • And just for fun, follow us on Twitter and Facebook to play SECRET WORD WEDNESDAY! Guess the SECRET WORD OF THE DAY, and win Wordnik stickers!

Hungry for more? Email us at feedback@wordnik.com and let us know what you’d like to see!

Also — for all you developers out there, keep an eye out for details of Wordnik’s first developer contest! We’ll be making an announcement this Friday …

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Wordnik & Wordie: Moving Day!

So we’ve unpacked all the Wordie boxes and all the data is moved in and put away nicely, so everything should be ready for Wordniks and Wordies to live together in peace and harmony.

If you’re a Wordie, in the vast majority of the cases your Wordnik username is the same as your Wordie username — to start using Wordnik, all you have to do is reset your password with this link. All your tags, lists, comments, and coolness will magically show up on Wordnik under your username.

A few Wordies and Wordniks had the same usernames — great minds think alike — so we staged a few contests of luck and skill to determine which person grabbed the prize. If your username was affected, you’ll get an email soon with your new username and a link to reset your password. (Again, all your data will show up on Wordnik under your new username.)

If we were pretty sure you were the same person on Wordie and Wordnik (same username, same or suspiciously similar email addresses) we merged the accounts. (Log in with your Wordnik password.) If it was merely a case of mistaken identity and you are now living with a stranger, let us know ASAP!

This was a BIG undertaking (kind of like docking the space shuttle, only without the triumphant classical-music soundtrack), so if you notice any wonkiness, please let us know. We’ll be doing a bit more polishing and dusting over the next couple of days to make extra-double-sure that everything is where it’s supposed to be and does what it is supposed to do!

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Our New Look

You may have noticed a new look at Wordnik this morning … just in time for Dictionary Day!

our new logo!

We’re hugely excited about this update, which includes some fun things (like the Random Word link and our new Zeitgeist page).

One other important new thing: logged-in Wordniks now have profile pages. By default, they’re all set to “private,” but if you would like to share your browsing history and favorite words with the world, you can set your profile to “public.”

We’ve made a lot of changes in a very short time, so please do let us know (at feedback@wordnik.com) if you see something broken or missing. We’d really appreciate it!

We’ll be changing (well, adding, mostly) more new stuff in the coming days and weeks, so stay tuned!

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Wordnik + Wordie

Wordnik + Wordie

Photo by, and licensed from, mybloodyself.

We are very excited to announce that John McGrath of Wordie.org is joining Wordnik … and that Wordie.org is joining Wordnik, too.

John brings tons of experience in making word-lovers happy, plus a great background in data visualization and Cool Web Stuff (we lured him away from the special web projects team at the New York Times). We’re thrilled he’s decided to make connecting people and words his day job!

We also feel like kids at Christmas at the prospect of merging all the great things we love about Wordie.org—the fantastic word discussion threads, the great lists, the fun user profile pages—with the torrents of data that we’re amassing here at Wordnik HQ, and having John around to help us make a site that is useful, friendly, helpful, and most of all, fun!

For the moment (while John moves to join us in California and settles in) neither Wordniks nor Wordies will see any big changes. We’ll be planning and plotting and figuring out how best to add Wordie’s right brain to Wordnik’s left (and Wordie’s chocolate to Wordnik’s peanut butter) so that we can build the best darn dictionary of the future possible.