Author Archives: Angela Tung

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Wordnik’s New Word Page: Lists

Continuing our walk through our revamped word page (last week we talked about the expanded Related Words section), today we’ll look at Lists.

Let’s use last week’s example, tree. Here’s the top of the word page:

Click on List and you’ll be taken to this section of the page:

On the left, you’ll see some of our favorite lists containing tree (determined by our own brand of interestingness).  To the right, you’ll see your own lists.  Toggling the check box on and off a particular list adds or takes away the given word from that list.

Click the check box to add word to list.

Click on the check box again to remove the word from the list.

If you hover over a particular list, you’ll see view to the right.

Click view and you’ll be taken to the page of that particular list.

Going back to the word page, scroll down a bit and you’ll see even more lists that contain that word, along with the number of words in each list.

Curious about our favorite lists? Check out this post celebrating the milestone of 25,000 user-generated lists, and follow us on Twitter or Facebook to keep up with our lists of the day.

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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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This Week’s Language Blog Roundup

It’s Friday and you know what that means: it’s time for our weekly language blog roundup, in which we bring you the highlights from our favorite language blogs and the latest in word news.

Monday was E.B. White’s birthday, and Open Culture celebrated with this sweet, sad animated film based on one of White’s short stories.  Another famous author in the news this week was Jane Austen, whose manuscript for an unpublished novel, The Watsons, sold for $1.6 million (Sir Naipaul, any comments?).

This week we learned that English is, among other things, a shameless whore and a magpie, “forever picking up shiny things.”  We learned of some culture-bound syndromes like amok and old hag syndrome; the three most common uses of irony; and nine words we’re probably confusing with other words.

We considered the douchebag, the difference between tot moms and baby mamas, and mouth-filled speech. We looked at some irritating Americanisms, pictures of Manhattanhenge, and the high cost of spelling mistakes.

The Macmillan Dictionary Blog provided guidance on the British Library’s dialectal wordbank, and told us about “not exactly” as a polite-ism in British conversation.  The Economist’s language blog Johnson was surprised the NSA style guide was sort of hippie-ish, and assured us that being an antichrist isn’t the same as being the devil.

The Virtual Linguist told us about glamour and it girls, while Dan Jurafsky at The Language of Food gave us a history and language lesson on ice cream.  Stan Carey posted about comic book grammar and canine comprehension, while Arnold Zwicky wrote about the “indecency” of the slut and the uterus, and what exactly is the plural of portmanteau (psst, it’s portmanteaus).

Motivated Grammar wondered is it +1’d or +1ed (or perhaps we should call the whole thing off), while Word Spy spotted elderburbia, “suburbs that have a predominantly elderly population,” and singlism, “workplace discrimination against employees who are single; the negative stereotyping of single people.”

The Dialect Blog discussed the hippie dialect (far out, man!); the Ocracoke brogue of the remote islands off of North Carolina, “sometimes mentioned as one of the ‘last living relatives’ of Elizabethan or Early Modern English”; the three types of Australian accents; and Jamaican patois and the English schwa. Literal-Minded explored the ordering of adjectives, while K International mused on the translation of foreign store signage, teaching language with Twitter, and a perhaps more natural way of speaking with cars (KITT, can you hear me?).

Finally, we’d like to end this week’s roundup with this lovely video about a secret bookstore in New York.

That’s it for this week.  Till next time, peace out, you hepcats.

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Attention all muggles and squibs!

Unless you’ve been locked up in Azkaban all summer, you’ll know that the very last Harry Potter movie opens today.  We at Wordnik love the JK Rowling series, and not just because of the magic and butterbeer.

“The Harry Potter books,” writes Jessy Randall in this essay from VERBATIM, “are not just good literature but a treasury of wordplay and invention,” and we couldn’t agree more.

There are the Latin-based spells. Reducio, which reduces the size of an object, notes Randall, comes from the Latin reducere (re- “back” + ducere “bring, lead”).  Some more examples from Randall:

Reparo! (Latin reparare) repairs. Riddikulus! (Latin ridiculus) turns an enemy— usually a Boggart—into something ridiculous or laughable. Lumos! (Latin lumen, ‘light’) causes illumination. Impedimenta! (Latin impedimentum) impedes or slows the enemy. Sonorus! (Latin sonor, ‘sound;’ English sonorous) causes one’s wand to become a microphone. Stupefy! (Latin stupefacere, stupere, ‘to be stunned’) stupefies the enemy, causing confusion. Expelliarmus! (Latin expellere, ‘to drive out’) expels your opponent’s wand from his or her hand.

Many of Rowling’s terms are also common words with other meanings. While a muggle is known in the Potterverse as “a person who has no magical abilities,” it also once meant “a contest between drinkers to decide which of them can drink the most,” and also referred to a marijuana cigarette, hot chocolate, and “to be restless; to remove, deface or destroy a geocache.” A squib is the unmagical offspring of magical parents but also “a small firework that is intended to spew sparks rather than explode; a short piece of writty writing; an unimportant, paltry, or mean-spirited person.”

Characters’ names are often also common words.  A dumbledore is a bumblebee.  Snape is a ship-building term that means “to bevel the end of (a timber or plank) so that it will fit accurately upon an inclined surface.” Hagrid is the past participle of hagride, which means “to harass or torment by dread or nightmares.”  Skeeter is a term for an annoying pest, and not just Rita Skeeter, blood-sucking journalist.  Mundungus is “waste animal product” or “poor-quality tobacco with a foul, rancid, or putrid smell,” a good name for a sneaky thief.

If you’re interested in all the words of Harry Potter, you’re in luck: we have Potterlists here, and here, and here, and here.  If you love all things magical, check out It’s Magic! and -Mancy, which list different kinds of -mency and -mancy words, or divinations. This one is about extrasensory individuals, including sibyl, “an old woman professing to be a prophetess or fortune-teller; a sorceress,” and the namesake of Sybill Trelawney, Hogwarts’ professor of divination. Also don’t forget spells, spellcasters, and amulets.

Whatever your fancy, bring your wands and remember, in the words of Hermione Granger, it’s wingardium levi-O-sa!

[Photo: In Flex We Trust]

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Wordnik’s New Word Page: Related Words

You probably noticed that last month we launched a redesigned word page, and that our new pages include an expanded Related Words section.

What do we mean by “related words”?  Synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, words used in the same context, a reverse dictionary, and tags. But what does all of that mean?

Here’s the top of the word page for tree:

Click on Relate and you’ll be taken here:

First up are synonyms, or words with the same or similar meaning, for instance, timber and sapling.

You’ll also find hypernyms, otherwise known as superordinates, or words that are more generic or abstract than the given word.  The prefix hyper- means “over, beyond, overmuch, above measure,” so you can think of a hypernym as a sort of umbrella over more specific words.  A hypernym for tree might be flora.

Hyponyms, or subordinates, are words that are more specific than the given word (the prefix hypo- means “under, beneath”).  Simal, coralwood, kingwood, and willow are specific types of trees (hey, that would make a great list!).  Same context refers to words that might be used in a similar context, such as wood, grass, garden, and branch. (One could argue that branch is also a meronym, or “a term that names part of a larger whole,” for tree.) We use the great resource WordNet for much of our hyponym and hypernym data.

The Reverse Dictionary section lists words that contain the given word in their definition. Tags are anything you might want to tag the given word and Tagging lists words that have been tagged with the given word.

We’d love your feedback as you explore our new Related Words section!

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This Week’s Language Blog Roundup

It’s that time once again when we bring you the highlights from our favorite language blogs and the latest in word news.

The Economist’s language blog Johnson rang in the Fourth with American accents and Accigone, the accent eradicator, while the Dialect Blog provided British accent samples instead.  At Language Log, Mark Liberman took a look at things that aren’t what they are, namely Google’s recent bids for Nortel patents (“pi” and “the distance between the earth and the sun” are just a couple of examples); some verbal illusions (no one is too busy to read this post, right?); and some variations on the French oh la la.

Language Corner at the Columbia Journalism Review took issue with using words such as gonna and wanna to convey dialect, while The Economist explored the diverse world of voiceovers and dubbing in the Arab film industry, from “Syrian musalsalaat, or soap operas,” to Gulf Arabic for “dramas from India and its neighbours.”

In endangered languages, it appears that as elders die off, fluency in Maori is diminishing, even as the number of Maori speakers increases, while according to K International, the Oaxca, an indigenous people of Mexico, are rethinking their strategy in maintaining their language.

K International also took a look at one foundation is using technology to preserve languages, as well as some unlikely language preservationists – teenagers, namely those in southern Chile who have been “posting videos on YouTube of themselves rapping in a mixture of Spanish and Huilliche, an indigenous language with only about 2,000 speakers,” as well as teens texting in regional and indigenous languages in the Philippines (as mentioned in our last post) and Mexico.  Another online project gives a home to dying languages, while social networking may give Welsh a new lease on life.

Johnson also mused on color naming, while Lynneguist at Separated By a Common Language discussed making suggestions in different cultures.  Arnold Zwicky had fun with telephon- combining words; some porn-manteaus; and mishearing Navy SEALs as baby seals.  Headsup: The Blog asserted that serve and serve up cannot be used interchangeably, at least where people are concerned.

The Virtual Linguist blogged about naturists’ – or nudists’ – slang (for instance, “cotton-tails. . .are people with white bottoms ie non-naturists, or, at the very least, recent converts to naturism”); a several hundred year old term for prostitute; and a couple of slang terms for money.  And the Dialect Blog recounted the evolution of the word, douchebag.

This week we also learned of a chimp who recognizes synthetic speech; a scholar who is studying how the concept of time differs across languages; and that the prolific British Library is building a database of Britain’s most obscure words. Some of our favorites?  Dimpsy, “half light, just turning dark,” gurtlush, “the best,” and tittermatorter, “seesaw”.  We also found out that the third edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction will be available later this year online for free, and then our heads  exploded with excitement.

That’s it from here! Till next week, adios, au revior, aufweidersehn!