Category Archives: news

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Wordnik Now Makes SmartMoney Smarter (Wordnik Means Business)

Wordnik means business — we’re happy to announce today that Wordnik is powering SmartMoney.com’s new financial terms glossary!

SmartMoney Glossary

The New SmartMoney Glossary

With more than 4000 words and phrases, SmartMoney’s new glossary is the place to go to make sense of the words that matter in your financial life. Keeping track of your finances is difficult enough, without the added hurdle of wading through financial jargon, too. Wordnik helps demystify opaque terms such as recission, dilution, and butterfly spread, making it easier for you to make meaningful choices about how you live your financial life. In addition to traditional definitions and explanatory notes, the new SmartMoney glossary also includes helpful example sentences showing the terms in real-world contexts, from up-to-date articles from across the The Wall Street Journal Digital Network.

flight to quality at SmartMoney.com

Alongside the stand-alone glossary, selected articles in the The Wall Street Journal Digital Network will also have a useful footer line to highlight important terms you may want to look up.

SmartMoney Glossary

To provide the example sentences, Wordnik has analyzed thousands of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network articles (from SmartMoney, The Wall Street Journal, and MarketWatch) to show the most explanatory and illuminating content for the most important words and concepts, leading readers to current trending articles as well as rich archival information. Taken together, these enhancements will not only allow SmartMoney readers to understand the traditional meanings of important financial terms, but will also let them interact with news content in ways that provide fresh discovery of words, phrases, concepts, and entire articles.

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Wordnik Site Updates

We’re happy to announce we’ve made some updates and improvements to our site.

Feedback

Your feedback is important to us and so we’ve made it even easier for you.

Wherever you are in the site (except, for now, the blog), at the top left you’ll see a gray Feedback tag. To send us a comment, just click on the tag and fill in the dialog box.

Once you submit, an email will be sent to those of us managing the feedback channel. You can also see all the reported issues and their statuses in one place.

Profile Page

Your comments are now front and center on your Profile Page.

In addition, if you have a picture uploaded in Gravatar, it will automatically appear beside your user name.

Word Page

Definitions are now grouped by dictionary source.

Community

As on the Profile Page, recent comments are the focus of the Community page. You can still also find:

  • recently loved (or favorited) words
  • trending words
  • new lists
  • recently listed words
  • top listers

Lists

Comments are back! You can now add comments to your own and anyone’s lists.

You can also now see the list’s Contributors and how many words each Contributor has added to that particular list.

To see a word’s stats, just hover it.

You’ll see number of other lists that word appears in, and the number of comments the word has.

Also, you can now add multiple words at once to each list, by separating each word with a semicolon.

Go to the bottom of the list to add words.

We’ll be rolling out more updates over the next several weeks. As always, let us know what you think, either via the Feedback tag or by emailing us at feedback@wordnik.com

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Wordnik News: Swagger, Jobs, NoSQL Now

Here’s a roundup of the latest in Wordnik-related happenings.

Wordnik’s got Swagger. This week we released Swagger, a specification and complete framework implementation for describing, producing, consuming, and visualizing RESTful web services. The goal of Swagger is to enable client and documentation systems to update at the same pace as the server. The documentation of methods, parameters and models are tightly integrated into the server code, allowing APIs to always stay in sync. See the write-up on ReadWriteWeb for more information.

Jobs. Wordnik’s hiring! Check out the Jobs page for the latest openings. More to come!

NoSQL Now Conference. Our own Tony Tam will be speaking at the NoSQL Now Conference in San Jose on August 25, on the topic “What Drove Wordnik Non-Relational?” Sign up now!

Reminders. Remember that Erin McKean’s TED book, Aftercrimes, Geoslavery, and Thermogeddon: Thought-Provoking Words from a Lexicographer’s Notebook, is now available. Erin’s book takes a “revealing look at a torrent of new words and phrases—in science, politics, social life—that reveal our changing societies,” and is available on Amazon for the Kindle.  Also take a look at Erin’s latest Boston Globe column for more collectible words.

Finally, don’t forget about the Wordnik-powered weekend feature in The Wall Street Journal, “The Week in Words,” a field guide to unusual words in that week’s WSJ issue.  Here’s last week’s column and this week’s.

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Wordnik News

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up on the latest in Wordnik news.

First up, this Sunday morning Wordnik founder Erin McKean will be appearing on Press:Here, an NBC show broadcast in the San Francisco Bay Area which features stories on Silicon Valley’s technology industry.  Erin will be talking about redefining the dictionary, “good” and “bad” words, what makes a word, and (of course) Wordnik. Can’t wait till Sunday or not in the Bay Area? Watch the clip here.

Next up, Erin’s TED book, Aftercrimes, Geoslavery, and Thermogeddon: Thought-Provoking Words from a Lexicographer’s Notebook, is now available.  TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and is “a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading.”  Erin’s book takes a “revealing look at a torrent of new words and phrases—in science, politics, social life—that reveal our changing societies.”  It’s available on Amazon for the Kindle, and on iBooks.

Finally, Wordnik is powering a new weekend feature in The Wall Street Journal, “The Week in Words,” a field guide to unusual words in that week’s WSJ issue.  Here’s last week’s column and this week’s.

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Support Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Efforts

Over the past several days we’ve seen a significant increase in searches for tsunami and other earthquake-related terms on Wordnik. In light of that we’ve added a banner to the top of many of these pages linking to the American Red Cross donations page, and to the Google crisis response page, which has more detailed information about relief efforts. (The Google page also includes a form to donate directly to the Japanese Red Cross, to which Wordnik.com is making a donation.)

If you see additional words that do not have the banner that you’d like to suggest get the banner treatment, please leave a comment here … thank you!

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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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Beware the Econorrhea

Trevor Butterworth is the editor of the absolutely fantastic STATS.org blog, which has been my favorite media watchdog publication for the past few years. They post authoritatively on topics like media coverage of health issues and the use and abuse of statistics, and happily their quantitative bent is accompanied by a joy in language, particularly of the so-bad-it’s-good variety.

Last month Trevor posted a Wordie list, subtitled Econorrhea, of neologisms and portmanteaux having to do with the economic implosion, which he has now worked into a Jabberwocky parody* on Recessionwire—which is itself compiling the beginnings of what could be something fun: a recession lexicon. It’s all worth checking out, in particular STATS.

* Check the comments too: he’s being pursued by the Lewis Caroll Society.