Author Archives: Erin McKean

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Celebratory Haiku!

In our “welcome to Wordnik!” emails we told folks that “we’d love to hear your comments, suggestions, or celebratory haiku.” We’ve gotten oodles of great comments and helpful suggestions, but these brave and lovely souls took us up on the haiku part:


Palimpsests reborn!
Trails of words come slithering
through the intertubes.


—Tom W. (Thosh) (who found us via Making Light, woot!)


Wordnik.com rocks.
Discovering all the words
With my help. Yippee!


—Glenn Atkinson


mental espresso
scrabble serendipity
wordniks don’t mind beta


—Jay Levin


and this funny (if not quite polite) offering:


Neologisms
Contextually defined
Bite me, OED


—Hillary Israeli, who said “sorry for being crude, but hey-I’m excited about wordnik!”


(We hope our friends at the OED can take a joke.)


And this one, from Emily Ng, just came in this morning!


Hello Dear Wordnik,
i shall spend countless hours,
Getting lost in words.


Got a celebratory haiku of your own? Feel free to leave it in the comments.

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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!