Author Archives: Erin McKean

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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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Announcing the new Wordnik alpha APIs! (UPDATED)

Today we’re happy to announce the alpha version of our new Wordnik APIs! UPDATE: See the video of the announcement we made at the Web 2.0 Summit.

Wordnik’s goal is not just to collect at least some information about every word in English — it’s also to make great information about words widely available, and our alpha APIs are a first step towards that goal.

Our new APIs include:

  • a definitions server, with definitions from The Century Dictionary (other dictionaries will be coming soon);
  • a “frequency” API, which returns a frequency number based on our initial API corpus*;
  • an “examples” API, which will return up to five example sentences for any word that appears in our initial API corpus;
  • the Wordnik word-of-the-day API (so you can create your own word-of-the-day wrapper or widget);
  • and it’s not really a standalone API, but we’re also throwing in an autocomplete API that is useful for making stuff with the other APIs.

You can sign up for our APIs here. Depending on demand, we may have to stagger approvals so as not to overwhelm the servers. If you want a better chance of being approved, give us as much detail as possible about how you plan to use our APIs. Coolness counts (but spelling doesn’t — since we haven’t released a spelling API yet).

Rudimentary documentation is here.

This is just a start — we’re hoping to release new APIs at regular intervals, so if there’s a kind of word data you’re longing to have access to, please let us know!

(* Our initial API corpus is about 3 billion words of running text. The API corpus is slightly different from the corpus that drives the Wordnik web site.)

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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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TED talks: setting a good example (and then some)

Wordnik + Wordie

Photo by, and licensed from, advencap.


As you might already know, we here at Wordnik are huge fans of the TED conference (and probably wouldn’t be doing Wordnik without TED)! So when we had a chance to add the TED talk transcripts to the Wordnik corpus of language use (our giant collection of the English language that we mine for example sentences and cool stats), we jumped at it — and we weren’t disappointed, because we found some fantastic words (and examples) in them.


For instance, here’s a great example from E.O. Wilson’s Ted Prize talk about saving life on Earth:


“The viruses, those quasi-organisms among which are the prophasias — the gene weavers that promote the continued evolution in the lives of the bacteria — are a virtually unknown frontier of modern biology, a world unto themselves.”


“And what you’re looking at with this namibiensis is the biggest bacteria we’ve ever seen.”

(from Juan Enriquez on genomics and our future)


“You can think of this as the language of thought, or Mentalese.”

(from Steven Pinker on language and thought)


Another great thing about the language of the TED talks is that it’s spoken language — formal spoken language written down, but still spoken. Which means we get proof for great words like web-ness:


“So every item, every artifact that we make, will have embedded in it some little sliver of web-ness and connection, and it will be part of this machine, so that our environment — kind of in that ubiquitous-computing sense — our environment becomes the web.”

(from Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web)


These sentences show what Wordnik believes — that great sentences from great communicators help illuminate words better than any dictionary definition ever could.


(And yes, one of my sentences made it in, too, and I’m happy to be in such good company.)

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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.

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Hurrah! We Have a Word-of-the-Day Widget!

Wordnik now has a word-of-the-day (henceforth WOTD) widget!


Wordnik WOTD widget


You can check it out and grab the code here.


With our new widget you can display the Wordnik WOTD on your blog or website, for the entertainment and edification of your readers!


If you’d rather follow the WOTD through RSS you can use this link. (You can also follow us on Twitter for WOTDs, interesting language links, and more.)


We’ve also added a new graph to some word pages—a punctuation profile!


Hurrah!


The punctuation profile gives you an idea of how often a word is followed by an exclamation point, a question mark, or a period at the end of a sentence, as compared with the average for all words.


As you can see, an exclamation like hurrah is more likely than average to be followed by an exclamation point, and less likely to be followed by a question mark.


The punctuation profiles are turning up some interesting conundrums: for instance, why is the tally of question marks so high for the word peanut?


peanut?


(It can’t all be because of Wordnik’s favorite movie…)


We hope you enjoy the words of the day and the punctuation profiles! If you’d like to email us suggestions for future WOTD candidates, you can do so at feedback@wordnik.com.