Category Archives: Using Wordnik

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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’s New Word Page: Lists

Continuing our walk through our revamped word page (last week we talked about the expanded Related Words section), today we’ll look at Lists.

Let’s use last week’s example, tree. Here’s the top of the word page:

Click on List and you’ll be taken to this section of the page:

On the left, you’ll see some of our favorite lists containing tree (determined by our own brand of interestingness).  To the right, you’ll see your own lists.  Toggling the check box on and off a particular list adds or takes away the given word from that list.

Click the check box to add word to list.

Click on the check box again to remove the word from the list.

If you hover over a particular list, you’ll see view to the right.

Click view and you’ll be taken to the page of that particular list.

Going back to the word page, scroll down a bit and you’ll see even more lists that contain that word, along with the number of words in each list.

Curious about our favorite lists? Check out this post celebrating the milestone of 25,000 user-generated lists, and follow us on Twitter or Facebook to keep up with our lists of the day.

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Wordnik’s Word Pages: now with 86.5% more resplendence

We’re happy to announce today a new look for the (millions and millions of) Wordnik word pages:

The new pages are cleaner, easier to navigate and read, more colorful, and have been shown in controlled, double-blind experiments to increase the love of words, writing and speaking skills, and vocabulary retention by up to 115% in test subjects*.

New features include an expanded Related Word (thesaurus) section, with a new “Reverse Dictionary” section:

screenshot of related words at "better"

Word pages now include list previews, so you can easily see information about the lists that include the word you’ve looked up:

We’ll be rolling out more improvements and more new features across all of Wordnik.com over the next few weeks. As always, you can send us your thoughts via feedback@wordnik.com or by leaving a comment here.

[*test subjects may or may not have been Wordnik employees and their families.]

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Wordnik Mobile

When you visit Wordnik.com on a smartphone you now get a mobile-optimized version of the site, featuring definitions, examples, related words, and, new in this version, audio. The mobile site, http://m.wordnik.com, delivers the most commonly-sought information on Wordnik.com in a mobile-optimized design that’s easier and faster to use (and which iPhone users can easily add to their home screen). If you want more in-depth information you can click through to the full-sized (immobile?) site, and if you want to always get the larger site, you can opt out of the mobile version altogether.

Mobile traffic to Wordnik is growing—over twenty percent of visitors are using tablets or smartphones—and we strive to be the best source of language information, however and wherever you need it. Please let us know what we can do to keep making the mobile experience better.

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More Audio on Wordnik

Audio pronunciations from the Macmillan Dictionary—over 43,000 of them—are now available on Wordnik.com, and also through our API.

Mr. Macmillan* has a lovely voice, and is more upbeat than Mr. and Ms. Heritage, as you can hear on frankfurter and wheezy. He sounds a little like the Moviefone guy.

This update gives us audio on a number of words that previously didn’t have any, like 18-wheeler and zzz. If you want to contribute a regional variation or your own version of a pronunciation just go to the ‘Pronunciations’ section of any word and use built-in recorder.

*update: Just discovered there’s a Ms. Macmillan as well.

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Create Your Own Word of the Day

Sweet Tooth Fairy of the Day

Wordnik offers a Word of the Day email every weekday. Now every Wordnik user can create their own Word of the Day, without worrying about details like managing subscribers or sending out emails. Ever wished Wordnik offered words of the day on specific topics, or a word a day for SAT study or other purposes? Now you can take it into your own hands 🙂

From your profile page just click the ‘Create your own Word of the Day’ link in the right-hand column, and you can then add and schedule words, and invite friends to subscribe. You can invite other Wordniks by username, or anyone with an email address (they’ll have to create a Wordnik account to accept the invitation).

When viewing your own word of the day you’re able to see all of your words, past and future. If you look at someone else’s WotD you’ll only see past words, but with one click you’ll be able to sign up and receive new ones every day by email.

You can find recent WotDs to subscribe to on the Community page, or by checking out the complete list of all words of the day. We’ll be adding to this feature over time, so if you have any requests, please let us know in the comments.

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Improved Search: Wildcards and Lists

We’ve rolled out a handful of improvements to word search. There’s more on the way, but here’s a quick overview of two new features: wildcard searches and list search.

These can be used from our recently-added search results pages, which you can get to either from the ‘See all results for’ link at the bottom of the autocomplete results when you search from any page, or by going to http://www.wordnik.com/search directly.

The * wildcard matches any number of characters:
http://www.wordnik.com/search/*tacular

? matches any single character:
http://www.wordnik.com/search/f?t

Or you can limit single-character wildcards to just vowels or just consonants with @ and # respectively:
http://www.wordnik.com/search/f@rt
http://www.wordnik.com/search/#at

Searching without wildcards returns results similar to what you see from autocomplete, but includes results from lists, tags, and related words:
http://www.wordnik.com/search/cat

Or you can specifically focus on lists and see more results:
http://www.wordnik.com/search/lists/cat

Upcoming releases will allow regex-style searches and let you search other kinds of Wordnik content. If you’d like to see other search-related features, or have suggestions for how these should work, please let us know in the comments or through feedback@wordnik.com.