Category Archives: Erin McKean

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Wordnik, Varnish

I just added a Wordnik chiclet to the word pages. The new link has pole position, on the far left of the row of links beneath each word.

I love Wordnik’s kitchen sink approach—they have tremendous data, all of which they dump in your lap—and that they include real-time search from Twitter, which will hopefully expand to include FriendFeed and other real-time services. They* are cataloging the language as it’s being used and created, which is awesome. Each of Wordnik’s 1.7 million words has a summary page which links to detail pages for etymologies, examples, tags, and more. It’s not much to look at yet, design-wise, but the content is fabulous. Slap on a coat of varnish and it’ll be perfect.

Speaking of varnish, last night I added a new caching mechanism to Wordie, called… Varnish. Wordie is serving pages considerably faster now, and I think this will also fix an occasional issue that made the homepage molasses-slow when it was being updated during high traffic periods. The changes may have broken some stuff in the margins (like Errata, for a while—thanks to telofy for alerting me to that), so let me know if Wordie is more erratic than usual.

* “They” are celebrity lexicographers Erin McKean and Grant Barrett, on the editorial side. Wordnik is pedigreed 🙂

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Other words of this year

Dictionary Evangelist, aka Erin McKean, has posted a list of coulda-been-a-contender words that didn’t make it onto the WotY shortlist, but perhaps should have. They’re solid words, and they’re words. The runners-up on the official OUP list included, to my mind, too many phrases, like “colony collapse disorder” and “social graph.”

Erin’s list: brick, hypermiler, griefer, jatropha, and unconference. Check out the post for the full poop.

There’s a movement afoot to pick a Wordie WotY, curated by the Coed League of Extrawordy Gentlemen, and chosen by popular vote. More details here.

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Erin McKean: Redefining the dictionary

LT Tim just sent me a TED talk by Erin McKean, lexicographer to the stars. That’s her on stage, beneath a portrait of Einstein, standing next to what appears to be a giant wooden dodecahedron*. And it looks like there’s some kind of psychedelic light show happening on stage right.

TED’s self-conscious “we’re smart” staging aside, the talk is great, and what she describes toward the end sounds a lot like Wordie, or what I hope Wordie will become. She makes the point that there are lots of good word collecting sites**, but they don’t do enough to show the context of words, to provide sources, citations, and provenance. The comments and citations, the links, jokes, and usage notes on Wordie are my Favorite part of the site, and finding good citations and quotes to add to Wordie has made reading a lot more fun for me, something I hadn’t thought possible. God forbid Wordie ever become too serious an endeavor, but it would be cool if, over time, our collective scavenging helped Wordie evolve into a useful language tool.

* UPDATE: see comments for what it really is
** I disagree. There’s only one 🙂