Author Archives: Erin McKean

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“Wittgenstein would love this, and he might just call it ‘awesomepants’.”

Pop Wittgenstein

Photo by, and licensed from, Arbitrary.Marks.


Thank you all so much for trying out Wordnik! We hope you’re enjoying using the site (and that you let us know about things you’d like us to change/fix/update).


A few of our favorite things from our first few days:


The tags “sprinkles” and “ice cream toppings“. (And the images at “jimmies“, yum!)


The pronunciation of “inconceivable” by Mitchell.


That 81 people (and counting) have looked up “lexicographer“!


The title of this post (which comes from a comment left on this post from our friends at the TED blog — thanks Shanna!)


Also, here’s our Firefox search bar plugin, for those of you who were looking for it.


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Come In, We’re Open!

Come in, were open!

Photo by, and licensed from, Gary Simmons.



Hey folks! Wordnik is now in open beta!


What does that mean? Well, you no longer need a username and password to check out the site (although you do still need one to leave notes, record pronunciations, and add related words and tags). Come on over and check us out!


We’re still in beta, though, so please don’t be alarmed if things don’t work perfectly smoothly — we’re working hard to add more words, more data, more cool, interesting, and informative features, and just more MORE in general!


Feel free to leave us feedback at any word—and have fun exploring words with Wordnik!


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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!

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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!

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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.