Today’s word of the day is fascinator. Besides the obvious meaning of “one who or that which fascinates,” it also means “a woman’s head scarf.” As you can see by the sentence examples and the images of fascinators, they’re mostly decorative rather than functional, they’re often crocheted, knitted, or made of lace, and they are indeed rather fascinating.
Today’s word of the day is cacoethes, an irrational but irresistible motive for a belief or action. It is also spelled cacoëthes and it is pronounced /kahk-uh-EE-theez/. Cacoëthes loquendi is a mania for talking or a morbid desire for gossip or speechmaking. Cacoëthes scribendi is a morbid propensity for writing or an itch for authorship.
Photo by, and licensed from, mybloodyself.
We are very excited to announce that John McGrath of Wordie.org is joining Wordnik … and that Wordie.org is joining Wordnik, too.
John brings tons of experience in making word-lovers happy, plus a great background in data visualization and Cool Web Stuff (we lured him away from the special web projects team at the New York Times). We’re thrilled he’s decided to make connecting people and words his day job!
We also feel like kids at Christmas at the prospect of merging all the great things we love about Wordie.org—the fantastic word discussion threads, the great lists, the fun user profile pages—with the torrents of data that we’re amassing here at Wordnik HQ, and having John around to help us make a site that is useful, friendly, helpful, and most of all, fun!
For the moment (while John moves to join us in California and settles in) neither Wordniks nor Wordies will see any big changes. We’ll be planning and plotting and figuring out how best to add Wordie’s right brain to Wordnik’s left (and Wordie’s chocolate to Wordnik’s peanut butter) so that we can build the best darn dictionary of the future possible.
I’ve got an amazing announcement: Wordie is going to become part of Wordnik.com, as am I. Wordnik is built by and for word freaks and is teh alsome; it’s hard to imagine a better partner for Wordie. I’m ecstatic about this, and I’m sure we’ll fit right in*.
For the time being what this means to you, the social word lover, is… nothing. Both sites will chug along while we plan their integration. Then in the not-too-distant future Wordnik will receive a facelift, and either as part of that or immediately subsequent to it Wordie will be formally incorporated into Wordnik.
Making lists, adding words to lists, and commenting on lists and words will remain core features and free, from now until the sun expands into a red giant, extinguishing all earthly life that hasn’t escaped the bounds of the solar system. Your Wordie identity will travel with you into Wordnik, as will your lists, your words, and your comments**. We will go to extreme lengths to ensure that Wordnik is infused with all that is good about Wordie.
Integration will be greatly eased by the fact that the two sites are eerily well-aligned: Wordie has few real lexicographic features (hi Weirdnet!) and will greatly benefit from the corpus humongous and sprawling lexicographical fantasia that is Wordnik. And Wordnik’s social features are, at the moment, few.
Hey kids, let’s build a dictionary!
The most exciting aspect of this is that we will now get a voice in building the mother and father of all dictionaries. Wordnik already has a tremendous amount of data, but it’s still at the beginning stages of an audacious project: to catalog all the English words that ever were and ever will be, to watch and listen to the language as it is created and evolves, and to talk about it while that happens. Because we’re joining forces early in the process of figuring out what a lexicographically rich, highly social dictionary-of-the-future can be, it gives those of us who care the opportunity to have our voices heard. You can start talking about what you’d like to see Wordnik become and how Wordie should fit into it in the comments below, or anywhere on Wordie (like Wordnik, for instance). And of course you can always email me.
Thank you.
I’m weak in the knees that I’ll now get to spend all day doing what I’ve previously had to relegate to nights and weekends, and I want to thank my new best friends at Wordnik for inviting me to the party. But most of all I’d like to thank all the Wordie regulars for turning Wordie from a small joke into a place I love, an avocation, and now something bigger. It’s amazing: I launched a very crude container and you guys filled it not just with words and lists, but with wit and erudition and good cheer. I am eternally, profoundly grateful.
You can email your thoughts, concerns, and suggestions to john@wordnik.com (john@wordie.org will always work too). I think this is going to be fun.
* Here’s Erin’s post on Wordnik.
** We’re working on a feature that lets you bring them with you into the afterlife.
Today’s word of the day is ultroneous, meaning “spontaneous” or “voluntary,” and described by William Ballantyne Hodgson as “not recognised by Johnson, and little needed by the English tongue.” It’s from the same Latin root ultro- as ultromotivity, capability of spontaneous movement. Eleanor Agnes Moore has a deliciously dreadful poem titled “Ultroneus” in her Poems of Endowment on The Realities of Life:
While the influence is morally, physically and refining,
Yet by softening and cheering expressions made,
Intellect may be developed and the power of thought strengthened.
When the part of ultroneous is retained to be used at times.
Eleanor Agnes Moore
Today’s word of the day is preterist, a person who is largely interested only in the past. The root preter- is from the Latin praeter meaning “past” or “beyond.” Anyone who has studied grammar will recognize it in preterite, but it’s also found in preternatural ‘beyond what is normal or natural’ and preterhuman ‘beyond what is human.’