Today’s word of the day is sedulous, diligent in application or in the pursuit of an object; constant, steady, and persevering; steadily industrious; assiduous.
Mumblement
Today’s word of the day is mumblement, a low, indistinct utterance or mumbling speech. Of the places we see mumblement being used, we are particularly fond of this little description of the indolent: “idle yawning assistant, with legs stretched out, half asleep, mumblement, jumblement and all” (from The Bertrams by Anthony Trollope). A synonym of mumblement is mussitation, a noun form of mussitate.
Wordnik word of the day: soubrette
Today’s word of the day is soubrette, a young woman regarded as flirtatious or frivolous. It comes from theatrical comedies and comic opera, in which a soubrette is a saucy, coquettish, intriguing maidservant or the actress taking such a part. The role is usually characterized by pertness and effrontery. Soubrette came into English from French, which took it as soubreto from Provençal, in which it meant “affected” or “conceited.”
Cremnophobia, morbid fear of…
Today’s word of the day is cremnophobia, morbid fear of being near the edge of a cliff, precipice, or abyss. Baudelaire, in the poem “Le Gouffre” (“The Abyss”), movingly described that fear (as noted by Max Nordau in Degeneration, 1895).
Here’s a translation of it from the blog “Thrice-Great” which attempted to translate Baudelaire’s poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) in a year. Two more translations into English can be found at lesfleursdumal.org. If it’s named fears and not poetry you’re after, try this list of phobias.
Le Gouffre
Pascal avait son gouffre, avec lui se mouvant.
— Hélas! tout est abîme, — action, désir, rêve,
Parole! Et sur mon poil qui tout droit se relève
Mainte fois de la Peur je sens passer le vent.
En haut, en bas, partout, la profondeur, la grève,
Le silence, l’espace affreux et captivant…
Sur le fond de mes nuits Dieu de son doigt savant
Dessine un cauchemar multiforme et sans trêve.
J’ai peur du sommeil comme on a peur d’un grand trou,
Tout plein de vague horreur, menant on ne sait où;
Je ne vois qu’infini par toutes les fenêtres,
Et mon esprit, toujours du vertige hanté,
Jalouse du néant l’insensibilité.
— Ah! ne jamais sortir des Nombres et des Êtres!
Wordnik word of the day: seidel
Today’s word of the day is seidel, a mug or glass for beer. It comes to English from German, in which language it means stein.
The exact size of a seidel depends upon the place and time. The November 1890 issue of the St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal says it equals a quart. This 1878 table of equivalencies more precisely says that in Austria a seidel was about 0.6229 of a pint, which is about 295 milliliters. Other measures have it from somewhat less than to much more than a quart.
H.L Mencken knew what a seidel was, as well as the full measure of his fellow men: “The average man, at least in England and America, has such rudimentary tastes in victualry that he doesn’t know good food from bad. He will eat anything set before him by a cook that he likes. The true way to fetch him is with drinks. A single bottle of drinkable wine will fill more men with the passion of love than ten sides of beef or a ton of potatoes. Even a Seidel of beer, deftly applied, is enough to mellow the hardest bachelor. If women really knew their business, they would have abandoned cooking centuries ago, and devoted themselves to brewing, distilling, and bartending.” (From Prejucides: Second Series, 1920, New York: Knopf.)
Announcing the new Wordnik alpha APIs! (UPDATED)
Today we’re happy to announce the alpha version of our new Wordnik APIs! UPDATE: See the video of the announcement we made at the Web 2.0 Summit.
Wordnik’s goal is not just to collect at least some information about every word in English — it’s also to make great information about words widely available, and our alpha APIs are a first step towards that goal.
Our new APIs include:
- a definitions server, with definitions from The Century Dictionary (other dictionaries will be coming soon);
- a “frequency” API, which returns a frequency number based on our initial API corpus*;
- an “examples” API, which will return up to five example sentences for any word that appears in our initial API corpus;
- the Wordnik word-of-the-day API (so you can create your own word-of-the-day wrapper or widget);
- and it’s not really a standalone API, but we’re also throwing in an autocomplete API that is useful for making stuff with the other APIs.
You can sign up for our APIs here. Depending on demand, we may have to stagger approvals so as not to overwhelm the servers. If you want a better chance of being approved, give us as much detail as possible about how you plan to use our APIs. Coolness counts (but spelling doesn’t — since we haven’t released a spelling API yet).
Rudimentary documentation is here.
This is just a start — we’re hoping to release new APIs at regular intervals, so if there’s a kind of word data you’re longing to have access to, please let us know!
(* Our initial API corpus is about 3 billion words of running text. The API corpus is slightly different from the corpus that drives the Wordnik web site.)
Wordnik word of the day: frisket
Today’s word of the day is frisket. We chose it because it’s fun to say, even though the meaning is a bit of printer’s jargon. It rhymes with biscuit and brisket. The Century Dictionary defines frisket as “a thin framework of iron hinged to the top of the tympan of a hand-press. For use, a sheet of paper is stretched and pasted over the frisket, and from this paper spaces are cut out to permit contact between the type and the sheet to be printed, which it serves to hold in place when the frisket is folded down upon the tympan, and to keep clean in the parts not printed.” If you want to learn more about old-fashioned printing, we recommend Practical Printing: A Handbook of the Art of Typography by John Southward.
A galley press.Image from Practical Printing: A Handbook of the Art of Typography by John Southward.