Category Archives: Wordnik.com

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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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Welcome JeanFrancois!

We are very happy to welcome both JeanFrancois Arcand and Atmosphere to Wordnik!

JF at Wordnik

JeanFrancois already improving the Atmosphere at Wordnik

JeanFrancois is a contributor to the extremely popular Apache Tomcat web server and created the GlassFish web container. He authored project Grizzlyand the Glassfish v3 micro-kernel, a framework for creating NIO and HTTP applications. JeanFrancois led the GlassFish Application Server project including its migration to open-source. Grizzly was one of the first production ajax push+comet frameworks, the technology which brought “chat” to the web.

At Ning and Sonatype he went on to author the Asynchronous HTTP Client (AHC), a client library for asynchronous java remote event processing. He conceived of Atmosphere, a framework for real-time communications through HTTP streaming, Comet, and WebSockets and has been leading it ever since. He was an active member for NIO.2 and Servlet 3.0 JSP committee.

JeanFrancois will work on Wordnik’s software architecture and algorithms, and Wordnik will become the sponsor of the open-source Atmosphere framework. We welcome him and his framework to the team!

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Wiktionary, Improved Profiles

tanorexia

Here’s a quick overview of some recent site updates. First, Wiktionary has been added as a definition source, giving Wordnik much better coverage of slang and pop cultural terms, among other things. We’ll be periodically re-importing Wiktionary data, so if you’d like to add material to Wordnik, editing the Wiktionary is now one way improve an awesome public resource and help Wordnik at the same time.

Profiles have also been updated. You can show your location, add a web address, and add links to other social services you’re on. Profiles also now optionally display your recent lookups.

Lastly, lists and other pages belonging to specific users now give a synopsis of that person’s contributions, something I personally missed and am psyched to have back. It’s fun to see who the real obsessives are, see when someone has passed a milestone, and to see who’s just getting rolling, so that we can welcome them into the fold.

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Wordnik, Now With More Thesaurus

We’ve added some new features to the ‘related words’ page, reorganized it, and given it a promotion: Wordnik now sports a thesaurus.

By far the coolest of its new powers is the ability to compare two words on the same page, showing definitions or examples for each side-by-side. It’s like a comparison shopping site, but for words.

To use it click the ‘Compare’ button in the right-hand column of any thesaurus page. Check the boxes next to the two words you’d like to see next to each other, et voilà — as soon as you’ve made your second selection, an overlay shows their definitions side by side. You can also see side-by-side examples, and tweet the comparison. It’s a comparithesaurus.

The tweet option brings up another featurette: Comparisons, despite being page-within-a-page, Pale Fire-style affairs, have URLs of their own, like this. So they can be tweeted, or emailed, or IMed, or whatever. We’ll be adding more built-in share options soon.

This is, like all of Wordnik, an ongoing effort. The underlying data is being continually improved, and the features will be added to and refined. If you have suggestions or criticism, please let us know in the comments or through feedback@wordnik.com.

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25,000 Lists!

Congratulations, Wordniks and Wordies! This week we passed 25,000 lists*!

What is a list? A list is just a collection of words that anyone with a Wordnik account can create. The words may be related or not, real or not, common or proper, single words or phrases. It’s really up to you.

At Wordnik, we like lists so much that we share one every day on Twitter — our List of the Day. With more than 25,000, we have a lot to choose from!

There are lists that are weather–related, color–related, or that make us hungry. There are lists that play with words, describe words, and have fun with sound. There are lists that bring back memories, celebrate a holiday or an author (like Shakespeare). There are lists that are sporty, sleepy, scary, or spicy; vegetable or animal; hot or cold; naughty, naughtier, and naughtiest.

The Community page shows you what other Wordniks are doing with their lists, as well as recent activity, such as words that have been recently listed, the latest lists, and the most-commented-on lists and words. You can also find recently viewed words, the latest comments, recent pronunciations, and recent favorites.

Now go and make your own list. We know you want to.

*Special thanks to mollusque for bringing this awesome stat to our attention.