January 1, 2016 by Angela Tung

Our Most Popular Posts of 2015

It’s been another wordy year for Wordnik. We continued our Adopt a Word program, made our Kickstarter goal (thanks again everybody!), and talked about all things word-nerdy on this blog.

We looked into the language of snow, surfing, taste, cotton candy, and even lavatories. We were surprised by some of the words coined by the likes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott, and George Bernard Shaw. We continued our television addiction with write-ups on the lexicon of Community, VEEP, and the final season of Mad Men.

Today we’re ringing in 2016 by celebrating our 10 most popular posts of the year.

Herman Melville: A Whale of a Lexicon

Cetology, plum-puddinger, slobgollion — not surprising from the author of Moby Dick. But cholo and nightlife? We never would have thought. Plus snivelization, “civilization considered derisively as a cause of anxiety or plaintiveness,” should definitely be used more often.

Congratulations! It’s a Word!

Want to adopt a word but not sure what word to pick? This round up of early adopters will inspire you.

For Whom the Words Toll: 10 Terms Coined by Ernest Hemingway

From byline to shit-faced to Yugo, these are some of our favorite words coined by the one-time journalist, bullfighting aficionado, and marrier of many spouses.

The Best of Jon Stewart Words

2015 was the year we said goodbye to Jon Stewart — at least from The Daily Show. To honor his 17-year stint as the most trusted man in America, we got all nerdy-glazy and presented 12 of our all-time favorite Daily Show words.

Game of Words: Our 14 Favorite Words from ‘Game of Thrones,’ Season 5

Speaking of the awesomeness of Peter Dinklage, our sixth most popular post was a gaggle of Game of Throne terms. The new season is supposed to start in April so you still have a few months to catch up.

Like billy-o! Our Favorite Words of Downton Abbey, Season 5

Our favorite source of meaningful glances, acerbic quips, and an anachronism or two.

12 Wonderful Words from TED

Wordnik all started with Erin McKean’s 2007 TED talk so it seemed only fitting we talk about some wonderful TED words, including ambivert, photograffeur, and biophilia.

10 Fantastic Fog Words

With our headquarters in San Francisco Bay Area, we certainly know lots of ways to say fog.

The Language of Convenience Stores

Bodega, milk store, dépanneur — how do you refer that little shop on the corner?

5 Cherry Blossom Terms, Translated

Winter has barely started but we’re already looking forward to sakura season again. For now we’ll make do with these cherry blossom terms, and our most popular post of the year.

September 15, 2015 by Angela Tung

Kicking off our Kickstarter: Let the word hunt begin!

As you may know, Wordnik became a not-for-profit last year, and shortly afterwards, we launched our Adopt a Word program. Today we’re excited to announce we’re expanding our efforts through our Kickstarter campaign, Let’s Add a Million Missing Words to the Dictionary.

You’ve probably noticed that many words, especially neologisms, technical terms, jargon, and slang, are still missing from most standard dictionaries, and that it takes a long time for new words to be added. While Oxford’s online dictionary is updated regularly, the more traditional Oxford English Dictionary is another story. For instance, twerk, which Miley Cyrus popularized in in 2013, dates all the back to 1820 but was only added to the OED this past June.

In fact, a 2010 study published in the journal Science estimated that as much as 52% of the unique words of English are missing from major dictionaries!

Wordnik is different. We think every word should be lookupable. We believe that users of English are the best judges as to whether any particular word belongs in their vocabulary, and that examples of real use by real people are the best evidence to drive those decisions.

With this Kickstarter, we hope to give each and every one of these missing words a good home on the Internet.

How? First, we’ll find the words! We have lists of hundreds of thousands of words that have been looked up on Wordnik that we don’t have good data for. We’ll start with those.

Next, instead of taking a long time to write definitions for these words, we’ll look for definitions that have already been written — not in dictionaries, but by journalists and writers who found a cool word, and wanted to explain it to their readers. We call these “free-range-definition examples” (FRDs, or “Freds”).

Here’s a good example of a FRD, for the word echoborg, from a recent article in the BBC: “Sophia is an ‘echoborg’ – a living, breathing person who has temporarily given themselves over to become a robot’s mouthpiece.”

We already have thousands of these FRDs labeled and can use them as a training set to drive machine learning to find many, many more.

We’ll also update Wordnik so that any time a word is looked up that we’ve never seen before, we’ll kick off a search to find more data about it. We won’t limit ourselves to words that are more frequent than one-in-a-billion, either. If a word exists at all, we’ll show you what we can!

Of course all of this takes time, people-power, and your help. And there are so many ways you can do so!

RANDOM BACKER: For one measly greenback, you can be a random word adopter. We’ll add your name to a “random sponsor” list that will display one random sponsor’s name every time someone clicks the “Random Word” link at Wordnik.com. We’ll also choose one random backer to receive all the other under-$500 rewards!

WE ❤️ STICKERS BACKER: At $10, we’ll send you a complete set of Wordnik stickers, plus a sticker conferring membership in the Semicolon Appreciation Society. We’ll also add a “Backer” badge to your Wordnik profile page.

ADOPT A WORD: For $25, we’ll list you as the proud adopter of your word for a year, and send you a full set of Wordnik stickers, plus special word adoption stickers and a downloadable commemorative adoption certificate. We’ll tweet about your adoption to Wordnik’s wordy followers, and we’ll also add an “Adopter” badge to your Wordnik profile page. Words are first-come, first-served, so back early!

YOU DESERVE A MEDAL!: Seriously. For helping Wordnik and adopting a word, backers at the $45 level will get an honest-to-goodness backer medal, plus all the Adopt a Word rewards!

OOH, POSTER: For $75, we’ll send you an 18×24 poster featuring a selection of the new words added to Wordnik! What will it look like? We don’t know! But we’ll be sending regular updates to backers at this level to get your input on the design! (Extra $15 shipping for international backers) [Limited reward: only 500]

NOMINATE A WORD: Want to suggest a specific missing word? At the $100 level, we’ll add your candidate to our research list and update it (data permitting) in the first batch. You’ll also be able to record the audio pronunciation for your word! Of course, you’ll also get all the $25-level adopter perks, and your Wordnik user page will show a “Nominator” badge! [Limited reward: only 1000]

WORDSMITH: For $250, not only can you suggest a specific missing word and record the audio pronunciation, we’ll also include the example sentence of your choice and link to its source. (Great for writers!) And we’ll make your word one of our words of the day for 2016, through the Wordnik site, our email list, and Twitter. You’ll also be the adopter of record for your word for TWO years, and get the full set of $25 adopter perks. (Your Wordnik user badge will read “Wordsmith”.) [Limited reward: only 45]

WORD-OF-THE-DAY TAKEOVER! At the $1000 level, you choose our words of the day for a whole week. Yep, choose any seven words you want (with the examples of your choice!), and we’ll send them out to thousands of word-hungry recipients! {Limited reward: only 12]

FOREVER ADOPTION: For $5000, adopt the word of your choice … FOREVER. We’re only making ten slots available! Obviously you’ll get all the other adoption perks, and your Wordnik user badge will read “Patron”. [Limited reward: only 10]

NEOLOGISM FOR YOU: Looking for a word that just doesn’t exist? At the $7500 level, we will create one for you to your specifications! Obviously you’ll get all the other adoption perks, and your Wordnik user badge will read “Neologist”. [Limited reward: only 5]

SPONSOR A LETTER: For $10,000, your name will appear on every word beginning with the letter you sponsor! Letters will be first-come, first-served. (The letter S has already been sponsored.) [Limited reward: only 25]

To learn more, check out our Kickstarter page and video starring our fearless founder Erin McKean. We hope you join us in helping to find those million missing words.

May 28, 2015 by Erin McKean

Are you a #wordnerd or a #languagegeek?

A very generous donor has given us an omakase word adoption — we can choose any word! So we thought we’d use this to see whether Wordniks are more likely to consider themselves ‘word nerds’ or ‘language geeks’. (We can never decide — some days we’re one, and and some days the other.)

From now until 9:30 AM PDT on June 1, show whether you’re a #wordnerd or a #languagegeek by tweeting about our adopt-a-word fundraiser with either hashtag. We’ll pick one lucky retweeter to be the official adopter-of-record for their term of choice!

(Not on Twitter? Just leave a comment here or on our Facebook page!)

May the best quirky linguistic subculture win!

October 24, 2014 by Erin McKean - 1 Comment

Wordnik is becoming a not-for-profit!

Today we’re happy to announce that Wordnik.com, the world’s biggest online dictionary, has started the process of becoming a not-for-profit corporation, with the mission of collecting and sharing data for every word in the English language.

Since 2008, Wordnik has tried to be the place where every word — no matter how rare, weird, new, or ephemeral — could have a home. More than a hundred thousand Wordniks have made Wordnik.com their choice — not just for looking up (several million) words every day, but for creating a community for leaving helpful comments, adding useful tags, and making over forty thousand educational, entertaining, and just plain amazing word lists.

As part of Reverb Technologies, the word graph that we’ve created has shown tremendous commercial value in delivering remarkable insights about content and users.

As part of Wordnik.com, we’ll continue to develop and support the Wordnik API, too — expect some exciting announcements on that front in the next few months. (You can always find information on Reverb’s open-source API description framework at swagger.io.)

Reverb Technologies is continuing (and how!) with its goal of making meaningful connections for readers and publishers. Check out Reverb at helloreverb.com!

We hope you will support us in our mission to share all the words. Please email us at feedback@wordnik.com with any suggestions, questions, or advice!

April 9, 2013 by Erin McKean

March Wordnik of the Month: Madison Andrews

In our monthly Wordnik newsletter (which you, too, can get in your in-box by subscribing to our Word of the Day via email) last month we asked for volunteers for a new feature, our Wordnik of the Month. We got a great response, and are happy to feature Madison Andrews as our very first WotM (pronounced “whottem”)!

Madison Andrews is a journalist, editor, and graphic designer based in Austin, Texas. When she isn’t posting SAT Critical Reading and Writing advice on her blog, Mad Skills Vocabulary, she is a columnist and contributor for A New Domain and Tech Page One. Follow Madison
@madskillsvocab, or send her an email.

Of course, we had some questions for Madison …

1. How do you use Wordnik?

I use Wordnik to enrich the educational content on Mad Skills
Vocabulary. I’m particularly excited about our latest feature, Mad Skills Word Search, which I designed with Paul Bonner of NimbleQuick studios.

Mad Skills Word Search is a web app that uses the Wordnik API to provide definitions and examples of SAT words. So, say you’re a student, and you run across the word perfidious in a blog post or word list on the Mad Skills Vocabulary site. You could click on that link to find several different definitions and context sentences for the word.

Word Search is still in the early stages of development, but we’re excited to see where this project will lead. Currently, the only way to invoke the application is to click on a linked word in an article or word list on Mad Skills Vocabulary, but we’ll be adding a search page to the Mad Skills Word Search site. We also hope to eventually allow our users to take advantage of some of Wordnik’s more exotic offerings – etymologies and related words and audio pronunciations.

We’re also interested in building a community of Mad Skills users, and will be doing some other cool stuff in that direction, as well.

2. What’s your favorite thing about Wordnik?

My favorite thing about Wordnik is that it makes language fun, engaging, and interactive. Most students can’t learn new words and truly expand their vocabularies just by memorizing lists of SAT or AP exam words. They need to interact with a word, see several definitions, read lots of examples, hear the word, learn how it relates to other words that they know. Really get to the point where they can almost taste it. That’s what Wordnik provides, and that’s what I hope to provide in a more targeted way for the students who visit Mad Skills Vocabulary. For Mad Skills, the Wordnik API makes that possible.

3. What’s your all-time favorite Wordnik list?

Gravity’s Rainbow by dfw2008.

4. What one thing do you wish Wordnik would do (that it doesn’t now)?

Well, one thing we’re thinking about for Mad Skills is adding an interactive flash card application, and maybe even practice exams for high school and college students, and I agree with many of the users on your community forums that some kind of flash card capability would be a great addition to Wordnik, as well. But really, at this point we’re more focused on the API and figuring out how to take advantage of everything it provides, and we’re very happy with what we’ve seen so far.

5. What are some of your other favorite sites online?

… and whatever site I end up choosing as a replacement for Google Reader,
currently Feedly.

Would you like to be a Wordnik of the Month? Email us at feedback@wordnik.com with your answers to these questions, and enjoy your fifteen minutes of wordy fame …

January 22, 2013 by Erin McKean - 2 Comments

Introducing Reverb: Connecting People with Meaningful Content

We’re excited to announce today the forming of a new company, Reverb Technologies, Inc., which will incorporate Wordnik.com.

Over the past five or so years, as we’ve been working on Wordnik.com, we’ve realized that the technology we’ve been developing — not just Wordnik, but things like Swagger and a bunch of other tools and systems — was making Wordnik bigger on the inside than on the outside.

tardis, by feitoamao

With Wordnik.com, we’ve focused on one word at a time, and late last year we showed a little of what we could do at a slightly bigger scale with the beta launch of Related Content by Wordnik (now called Reverb for Publishers) but with the launch of Reverb today, we’re working to bring our technology to more developers, more publishers, and more consumers.

What does this mean for Wordnik.com? Well, Wordnik is now free to do what it does best — be a fantastic dictionary offering “360-degree views” of words, the biggest in the world, with the best users. We won’t have to drown it in ads, and we can continue to work on making it the best “single-word” view on Reverb’s word graph technology. The data we get from how users interact with Wordnik — listing, commenting, favoriting, and tagging words — will continue to be an important part of Reverb’s mission of connecting people with meaningful content.

As part of our continuing work on Wordnik.com, we’re happy to announce a new beta feature today — Wordmaps. Here’s one for apt (which is what we hope you think our new name is):

In the maps, squares get their size from the amount of “Wordnik love” a word has received (including listing and loves, among other things) and the color of the squares is driven by our calculation of how much the related word “matches” the mapped word. This feature is still in beta while we tweak our algorithms, so feedback is greatly appreciated!

(Also, check out the new floaty menus, a much-requested feature to help make it easier to jump right to whatever part of the word page you need.)

There’s much more coming, both from Reverb and for Wordnik.com. We’re looking forward to sharing it all with you!

[Photo: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 by feitoamao]

November 12, 2012 by Erin McKean - 1 Comment

Welcome Adam!

We’re happy to welcome Adam to the Wordnik team!

Adam Van Fossen is a market trend and business development professional. Prior to joining Wordnik, Adam was working in the mobile gaming industry at GREE, where he was building strategic partnerships with top tier content providers.

Adam’s career path took many twists and turns before landing in business development. He has worked as a photographer, on a dude ranch in Japan, and in a gold mine in Nevada.

In his free time, Adam enjoys snapping photos on his antique cameras, playing guitar, and hanging out with his wife and adorable basset hound.

We’re very glad to have Adam with us!