Author Archives: Erin McKean

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On (Y)our Mark …

On Your Mark!

Photo by, and licensed (C BY-NC-ND 2.0) from, chicagoceli.

We are overjoyed to welcome Mark Wong-VanHaren as Wordnik’s new VP of R&D. He’ll be working with us to turn billions of words of delicious language data into cool products and tools to help folks know and enjoy more about English.

Mark was one of the original founders of Excite, which was arguably the first *real* search engine. In addition to being a world-renowned technologist, he casually types around 130WPM on one of those crazy Kinesis keyboards.

Here’s Mark in his own words:

Mark Wong-VanHaren loves language. He has studied a half-dozen natural languages, and coded in far more programming ones. With friends from Stanford, he co-founded the pioneering search engine Excite, putting his Symbolic Systems skills to good use. He then worked with a handful of other start-ups, in addition to being an EIR at Charles River Ventures, before recently serving as CTO of Glyde, an e-commerce company. Mark loves afro-cuban music, playing hockey (both the ice- and table- varieties), functional programming, the Green Bay Packers, hiking with his family, and Almodóvar flicks.

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Wordnik and Blekko!

How we feel about helping Blekko searchers

We feel downright ebullient to be powering the “/define” slashtag for the awesome guys at Blekko!

Slashtags are our favorite thing about Blekko — you can use one (like /define or /language) to limit your search to just the slice of sources that are the most likely to give you the answer you need. You can make your own or you can use the preset slashtags that Blekko provides.

Blekko’s lots of fun — but even more useful. Try it, we think you’ll like it!

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Wordnik is Hiring! Know Ruby on Rails?

help wanted

[image by, and licensed from, Sekimura]

We are seeking a Senior Ruby on Rails Developer to help build Wordnik.com and create Wordnik functionality to our partners and developer community for both desktop and mobile applications.

Wordnik builds and supports Wordnik.com as well as a public RESTful API which serves millions of requests a day. We run with noSQL databases, analyze data with Hadoop, and use a variety of programming languages including Java, Python, Ruby and Scala. Wordnik is an open source friendly environment and we encourage contributions to collaborative projects.

Required Experience:
* Strong development background with 3+ years Ruby experience
* Ability to conceive and develop modern and usable UI/UX designs.
* Familiarity with modern HTML/CSS design and frameworks.
* Strong JQuery experience
* Integration with REST services, external web services
* Ruby performance tuning

You’ll do even better with:
* Mobile device development (iOS or Android)
* Integration with Facebook Connect, oAuth
* Experience in a fast-paced startup environment

We’d love to see:
* your github account
* open source participation

We:
* Are doing something unique and meaningful
* Have interesting problems to solve
* Are backed by top-tier investors

More info:

The beginnings of Wordnik @ Erin McKean’s 2007 TED talk:

More about Wordnik’s noSQL initiatives.

Wordnik is an equal-opportunity employer and we are committed to diversity in hiring.

Interested? Email us at feedback@wordnik.com.

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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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Announcing: “Secret Word Wednesday”

We’re trying something new here on Wednesday at Wordnik — “Secret Word Wednesday.” It’ll work like this:

  • We’ll choose a secret word.
  • We won’t tell you what it is. (That’s why it’s SECRET.)
  • We’ll tweet clues to the word (follow us at @wordnik).
  • When you think you know the SECRET WORD, tweet it! Use @wordnik so we can find your tweet.
  • If your guess is correct, we’ll re-tweet it, and ask you to email us so we can send you Wordnik stickers and other cool stuff!

And of course it wouldn’t be a SECRET WORD if it didn’t have a special extra … when you think you’ve found the secret word of the day, check the audio pronunciations for confirmation.

HA!

Photo by, and licensed (C BY-NC-ND 2.0) from, heather.

P.S. The secret word today is NOT “Door.”

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Cricket!

Cricket!

Photo by, and licensed (C BY-NC-SA 2.0) from, kkseema.

At Wordnik, we love all the words (that’s what the heart in the logo means, after all) but there are some words that are especial favorites (that’s what the favorite function is for, after all) … and quite a few of those words are cricketing terms. Only a couple of Wordniks can honestly claim to be true cricket fans (Krishna and Kumanan) but none of us can resist the lure of words like googly (“A googly is a ball delivered by a bowler that looks as if it ought to break from left to right across the bat of a right-handed batsman.”) and Dilscoop (” … [the] stroke “Dilscoop” [ invented by Tilakaratne Dilshan] which involves going down on one knee and scooping the ball over his head in area behind the wicketkeeper.”) Not to mention the best phrase in all of sports: silly mid-off. (Which is the same as the silly mid-on, just on the other side of the pitch. Make sense? No? Well, it doesn’t matter.)

Cricket words are so compelling, in fact, that Wordnik has three different lists devoted to cricket! They are: Sportie: Cricket, i don’t like cricket — i love it, and Cricket! That last link is to an open list — feel free to add your own favorite cricket terms to it!

Is there some other topic that you think has better words than cricket? You can always sign in to Wordnik and create your own list of great words to share …