Today’s word of the day—initialism of the day, if you prefer—is API, which stands for “application programming interface.” It’s how software, such as that which runs a web site, can make its data available in a raw form to other software so that new uses can be made of it. We’re launching ours today.
Today’s word of the day is doke, a deep dint or furrow, a contusion, or a flaw in a marble.
Today’s word of the day is spoony, meaning “enamored in a silly or sentimental way” or “feebly sentimental; gushy.” Someone who manifests spooniness is also called a spoony or just a spoon.
Today’s word of the day is palaver, meaning “idle chatter” or “talk intended to charm or beguile.” It’s also a verb. It comes from the Portuguese palavra (though perhaps its Spanish cognate is more familiar to modern Angolophones: palabra), meaning “talk, speech, word.” The word seems to have been picked up by English sailors and travelers on the west coast of Africa, where Portuguese was the chief language spoken with Europeans.
In honor of Noah Webster’s birthday, also known as National Dictionary Day, today’s word of the day is dictionary.
A page from Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary. More photos of it here.
You may have noticed a new look at Wordnik this morning … just in time for Dictionary Day!
We’re hugely excited about this update, which includes some fun things (like the Random Word link and our new Zeitgeist page).
One other important new thing: logged-in Wordniks now have profile pages. By default, they’re all set to “private,” but if you would like to share your browsing history and favorite words with the world, you can set your profile to “public.”
We’ve made a lot of changes in a very short time, so please do let us know (at feedback@wordnik.com) if you see something broken or missing. We’d really appreciate it!
We’ll be changing (well, adding, mostly) more new stuff in the coming days and weeks, so stay tuned!
Stay tuned! Wordnik is undergoing some major updates and will be back shortly