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The Name Game: Steve Rivkin

In the latest of our series of interviews with professional namers, today we speak with Steve Rivkin.

Steve is the founder of Rivkin & Associates LLC, a marketing and communications consultancy that specializes in naming. He is the co-author of The Making of a Name (Oxford University Press) – described by its publisher as “the definitive work on names and naming” – and has been called “America’s leading nameologist” by Asian Brand News.

How did you get started in the naming business?

It was an outgrowth of my consulting work in developing and then executing marketing strategies. The need for a new name was an integral part of the majority of these projects, and I was dissatisfied with the methods and narrow focus I saw.

Any new name, I believe, should embrace several disciplines. First and foremost, a new name must have a strong positioning orientation to help differentiate the brand. It also should have a strong consumer sensibility, and it should have a realistic basis in linguistics.

To do this requires seasoned professionals with hands-on business experience in marketing and communications. There are no rookies or academic linguists on our team, which is a common practice at the big naming factories.

What types of customers and clients do you work with?

All sorts. We have naming clients in the food, healthcare, communications, financial services, and technology sectors.

Please describe the naming process. Do you usually start with ideas, or do you find your customers often have their own ideas already?

We start with a clear briefing from the client on their objectives, likes and dislikes regarding a new name.

Next, we develop a specific vocabulary list about the client’s business, product or service. That list is then enlarged by adding roots, synonyms, analogues, idioms, collocations, and translations, to create the building blocks we need.

Then we employ a series of techniques that we know will generate large numbers of possible names: construction of new words (neologisms) from recognizable roots, by using word fusions, suffixes joined to building-block terms, and other methods; existing terms or words used in new ways, such as adapted metaphors; compressions or contractions of existing words and phrases; application of imagery and symbolism; and other techniques and inspirations.

What are some mistakes you’ve seen companies make in terms of naming?

Devouring their own. Alpo Cat Food, A-1 Poultry Sauce, V8 Fusion Plus Tea, Tanqueray Vodka. These marketers have stretched the original meaning of their names past recognition – or believability.

Yes, all brand names are elastic, to some extent. Consider the brand ESPN. It started out in 1997 as a single cable channel, but has since mushroomed into half a dozen other channels, two radio channels, Internet access, and a print magazine – all built around the concept of sports coverage and commentary. But note the core concept behind everything ESPN does. A name can only be stretched to a certain point before it “snaps” in the consumer’s mind and no longer stands for a clear concept.

Another common mistake: the impolite utterances that others have commented on, such as the shoe brands named Incubus (a demon) and Zyklon (a poison used by the Nazis). Ikea has a catalog offering for a workbench named Fartfull. (I’m guessing that moniker is attractive in Swedish.)

Foreign language stumbles are particularly embarrassing. Pajero, an SUV from Mitsubishi. (You can look it up in any Spanish dictionary:  “One who masturbates; a wanker.”)  Country Mist, a cosmetic product that Estee Lauder shipped to Germany. (In German, “mist” means “manure.”) Burrada, used to identify a frozen Mexican food entrée. (Burrada translates as “a stupid deed” or “ big mistake.”)

What are some names that you particularly like?

You know I’m going to embrace our creations for clients. Here are a few of them: Behold single-vision lens, Premio Italian sausages, Trueste perfume, Celsia Technologies, Global Impact for charitable assistance.

I’m also drawn to names that are unexpected combinations of language, because they engage the brain on several levels. They’re surprising, meaningful and playful – all at the same time. Examples: Geek Squad. DreamWorks, which combines the magic of movies with an old industrial term. Zany Brainy, the educational toy store. Sky Harbor, the name of the airport in Phoenix.

And I applaud companies which do not blur the distinctions among their brands. For instance, American Honda Motor Company applied its mid-range Honda brand name to a lineup of vehicles – Civic, Accord, CR-V. But as Honda climbed the ladder of performance, styling and luxury, it realized it could not “stretch” the Honda brand indefinitely – and the upmarket Acura brand was born, with a completely separate identity. (You have to search long and hard in Acura materials to find any references to Honda.)

What are some trends you’d sooner see die off?

One: The fascination with what I call techno-babble. Or we could call it geek-speak. Names such as (and I’m not making these up) @Climax, 1-4-@LL, 160 over 90, Design VoX, mmO2, and $Cashnet$.

Another: The epidemic of me-tooism of “Ameri-something” names:  Americare, Americone, Amerideck, Ameridial, Amerihealth, Amerilink, Amerimark, Ameripride – enough!

And one more sin in naming: Thou shalt not prepare alphabet soup. “JCP&L, a GPU Company.” How that’s for dead-end communication? Or these recent adventures into anonymity from the Fortune 500: AES, BB&T, KBR, URS, SLM. That’s a total of $35 billion in corporate revenues, all cloaked in an invisible, all-initial shield.

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Word Soup Wednesday: baller, Benghazi flu, Tuiasosopo

Welcome to Word Soup Wednesday, in which we bring you our favorite strange, obscure, unbelievable (and sometimes NSFW) words from sitcoms, dramas, news shows, and just about anything else on TV.

Midnight Game

Midnight Game, by Jonathan Kos-Read

baller

Andy: “You are officially a baller.”
Tom: “I’ve been a baller since birth, son. Now I’m an athlete.”

“Women in Garbage,” Parks and Recreation, January 24, 2013

Baller has two meanings here: “one who plays basketball,” and “one who lives an extravagant, money-driven lifestyle.” The first meaning originated around 1867, says the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and referred to a player of any ball game.

The second meaning is much newer, coming about around 1990, also according to the OED, perhaps “with reference to the perceived tendency of successful basketball players to spend ostentatiously.”

Benghazi flu

Jon Stewart: “Secretary Clinton was supposed to have testified back in December but kept postponing it for ‘health issues’ which came to be referred to by ‘medical professionals’ as [the Benghazi flu]. . . .The Benghazi flu turned out to be a cerebral blood clot.”

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, January 24, 2013

Benghazi flu was coined by Rep. Allen West, a Republican from Florida, who claimed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was faking illness in order to avoid testifying about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya in September. It was later revealed that Clinton had been suffering from a “blood clot near her brain.”

drone

Missy Cummings [Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT]: “The professionals in the field prefer to call [drones] unmanned aerial vehicles because the word drone connotates a kind of stupidness, and they’re definitely getting smarter.”

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, January 23, 2013

Drone meaning “a pilotless aircraft operated by remote control” is from 1946, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. The aircraft was perhaps named for its similarity in purpose and/or appearance to the male honeybee. The Ryan Firebee was an early drone model.

The meaning that Cummings is referring, “a kind of stupidness,” arose from the idea of the drone bee being stingless, preforming no work, and producing no honey, and whose “only function is to mate with the queen bee.” This gave rise to drone meaning “an idle person who lives off others; a loafer,” or “a person who does tedious or menial work; a drudge.”

gaslight

Jake: “I thought you and Marley were friends now.”
Kitty: “Duh, we are. I’m still gonna gaslight her every chance I get.”

“Sadie Hawkins,” Glee, January 24, 2013

To gaslight someone means “to manipulate [them] psychologically such that they question their own sanity.” This usage gained popularity in the 1960s, says the OED, and comes from Gaslight, a 1944 film “in which a man psychologically manipulates his wife into believing that she is going insane.”

narcoterrorism

Edward Berenson [Professor of History, NYU]: “Think of these groups as a kind of combination of Mexican drug organization and an Islamic terrorist group. . . .So what you’ve got is narcoterrorism in a way in Mali.”

The Colbert Report, January 24, 2013

Narcoterrorism is “terrorism carried out to prevent interference with or divert attention from illegal narcotics trafficking.” The term originated in the early 1980s, says the OED.

norovirus

News announcer: “British researchers have created a projectile vomiting robot that mimics that symptoms of norovirus. Researchers created the projectile robot to test how far the dangerous contagions spreads every time someone throws up.”

The Colbert Report, January 21, 2013

The norovirus is also known as the winter vomiting bug. The name norovirus is derived from Norwalk virus, originally named after Norwalk, Ohio, where “an outbreak of acute viral gastroenteritis occurred among children at Bronson Elementary School in November 1968.”

orange fog warning

News announcer: “In China, hazardous record-high pollution levels in Beijing have prompted what’s called an orange fog warning.”

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, January 24, 2013

An orange fog warning doesn’t have to do with the color of the fog but with its density. Blue is the least serious, followed by red, orange, and finally yellow as the most serious. Some have dubbed this recent bout with air pollution in Beijing as airpocalypse.

pogo

Schmidt: “A pogo is what your friends talk about when you leave the room.”
Cece: “Oh. Like your barnacle toenails?”

“Pepperwood,” New Girl, January 23, 2013

Pogo in this context is a nonce word, “a word occurring, invented, or used just for a particular occasion.” Nonce comes from the Middle English phrase for the nones, “for the occasion.”

Randian

Stephen Colbert: “The Atlasphere.com is the best place for Randians to find the one they love other than their bathroom mirror.”

The Colbert Report, January 23, 2013

Randian means pertaining to the writer Ayn Rand, who created objectivism, a philosophy that asserted that “the proper moral purpose of one’s life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness (or rational self-interest),” among other tenets.

straw man

Paul Ryan: “. . .that rhetorical device [that] he uses over and over and over. . .a straw man.”
Jon Stewart: “I think a straw man is when you create or falsely characterize an opponent’s argument so that you can then easily dismantle the new fictional argument. . . .I think the President is throwing your own words back in your face without naming you. Passive-aggression, that’s what he’s using.”

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, January 23, 2013

A straw man is “an argument or opponent set up so as to be easily refuted or defeated.” The idea of a straw man as an “imaginary opponent” is recorded from the 1620s.

Tuiasosopo

Jon Stewart: “Al, I think you’ve been had by Hawaiian uber-prankster Ronaiah Tuiasosopo.”
Al Madrigal: “What? No. I got Tuiasosopoed? No!”

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, January 21, 2013

Ronaiah Tuiasosopo is supposedly the man behind the Manti Te’o girlfriend hoax. To be Tuiasosopoed means to be fooled by such a hoax. The word is both an eponym, a word derived from a person’s name, and anthimeria, using a word from one part of speech as another part, such as a noun as a verb.

[Photo: CC BY-ND 2.0 by Jonathan Kos-Read]

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A Short-Tempered History of the ‘Curmudgeon’

oscar the grouch

oscar the grouch, by whatleydude

It’s National Curmudgeon Day, which means you can embrace your inner grouch and grumble, complain, grouse, kvetch, and whine to your heart’s (dis)content. We’ll be taking a look at the history of curmudgeon words.

The word curmudgeon is an old one, originating in the 1570s, but where it comes from is unknown. The most famous suggestion, says World Wide Words, “is that of Dr Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary of 1755 [in which] he quoted an unknown correspondent as suggesting that it came from the French coeur méchant (evil or malicious heart).” However, this is now considered unlikely.

The Online Etymology Dictionary says “the first syllable may be cur ‘dog,’” or that the word may “have been borrowed from Gaelic” – muigean means “disagreeable person” – “with variant spelling of intensive prefix ker-,” a slang term “echoic of the sound of the fall of some heavy body.”

An older grouchy word is crab, which comes not from the crustacean but the sour crab apple, which in turn may come from Swedish dialect word skrabba, “fruit of the wild apple-tree,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Crab came to refer to a sour person in the 1570s.

Malcontent, which now especially refers to “one who rebels against the established system,” also means “a chronically dissatisfied person,” and entered the English language from the French in the 1580s. Crosspatch came about around 1699, says the OED, and was formed by joining, you guessed it, cross and patch, where patch refers to “a ninny; a fool,” or “a harlequin.” This sense of patch may come from the Italian pazzo, “fool.”

Grump originated around 1727 and meant “ill-humor,” as part of the phrase, humps and grumps, or “surly remarks.” Then came the grumps, “a fit of ill-humor,” in 1844, and grump meaning “a person in ill humor” in 1900. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word may be “an extended sense of grum ‘morose, surly,'” which is probably related to the Danish grum, “cruel.”

The word codger, referring to an eccentric or grumpy old man, is attested to 1756, and may be an alteration of cadger, “a person who gets a living by begging.” Crank seems to be a back-formation of cranky, which originated around 1807. In addition to “a grouchy person,” crank can also refer to “an eccentric person, especially one who is unduly zealous.”

The word grouch was born in the early 1890s, first referring to the grouchy mood itself, then soon after the grumpy person. The word was U.S. college students’ slang, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, possibly coming from the Middle English grucchen, “to grumble, complain.” A grouch bag is a “purse for carrying hidden money” and possibly the source of the nickname of Groucho Marx, “who supposedly carried his money in one to poker games.”

Finally, sourpuss is a 20th century grouch word, originating around 1937 as U.S. slang. Puss had been slang for face or mouth since about 1890, coming from the Irish pus, “lip, mouth.”

Still in a bad mood? Check out our list of the day.

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by whatleydude]

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This Week’s Language Blog Roundup: Inauguration Day, gun control, biblio-cats

Bookstore cat

Bookstore cat, by Sarah Stierch

Welcome to this week’s Language Blog Roundup, in which we bring you the highlights from our favorite language blogs and the latest in word news and culture.

We were saddened by the passing of Aaron Swartz, “computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist.” Ben Zimmer wrote about Infogami, a startup Swartz founded, while Geoffrey Pullum discussed “vague and lazy talk” about hacking.

For Inauguration Day, the Smithsonian offered visualizations of the meaningful words behind famous inaugural speeches; Ben Zimmer discussed words coined by U.S. presidents; and The New Yorker gave us a brief history of inaugural poems.

The New York Times reported that in the debate on gun control, even the language can be loaded, while at Johnson, Robert Lane Greene wondered if changing one word could change American opinions.

Johnson also discussed the language of gender and sexual orientation, a short history of you, and the singular they, about which folks had a lot to say, including Jen Doll (against), John McIntyre (for), and the Oxford Dictionaries blog (neutral).

At Lingua Franca, William Germano examined Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s signature and the paraph, “that flourish-y bit below a signature,” as well as catfishing and imaginary online friends. Geoff Pullum considered being an adjective, Lucy Ferriss peeked under the lid, and Ben Yagoda went po-faced.

At Macmillan Dictionary blog, Stan Carey mansplained the new-word-pocalypse, and on his own blog, played usage peeve bingo. In the week in words, Erin McKean noted jukochodai, old-school manufacturers; slow steaming, a technique for slowing down ships; laolaiqiao, “old people doing young things that even young people wouldn’t do.”

Fritinancy looked at drusy, “a crust of small crystals lining the sides of a cavity (or vug) in a rock”; snollygoster, “a shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician”; and some moist slacks (ew). She also discussed how to name anything.

Sesquiotica gave us a taste of phonemes, long and short vowel pairs, finicky, and frisky. The Dialect Blog dialogued on the Jamaican rounded schwa, and the Virtual Linguist told us about Silbo Gomero, “an old whistling language used on the Canary island of Gomera.”

Ben Yagoda discussed the Britishism have (someone) on. Allan Metcalf told us about a new crowdsourced Jewish English lexicon, Slate’s Lexicon Alley explained the origins behind the New York accent, and Chicago Magazine mapped the geography of Chicago’s second languages.

IBM’s supercomputer, Watson, is learning some slang; OxfordWords blog taught us slang of the prohibition era; and Jonathan Green gave us 50 (we think!) slang words that come from snow. The Economist discussed how the press in China is getting around censorship, while O Canada told us about a campaign to save old words, with quotes from Jesse Sheidlower, Mark Liberman, and our own Erin McKean.

This week we also learned a brief history of the dictionary, that Emily Dickinson scrawled her poems on tiny scraps of paper, how to insult in Lutheran, and how to speak Ned Flanders. We found out why the blues is called the blues, the science behind beatboxing, and why people roll their eyes when they’re annoyed.

We’re glad to see Ben Schmidt is still collecting anachronisms from Downton Abbey. We agree that editors are important and that cheesemongers do indeed pen some clever descriptions. We loved these best shots fired in the Oxford comma wars, these 16 great library scenes, and this amazing library (although the idea of robot librarians scares us a little). And then our heads exploded imagining all 11 Doctor Whos in one anniversary special.

We’d like to order all of these coffee drinks, then stay up all night playing these literary board games. We chuckled over these light bulb jokes for the publishing industry and are currently memorizing these 17 vowel free words that are acceptable in Words with Friends. We liked these lolcats of the Middle Ages and awww’d over this catalog of bookstore cats.

That’s it for this week! Until next time, have a dandy-diddly day-di-iddlyo!

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Sarah Stierch]

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Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Words We Found There

[ T ] John Tenniel - Alice Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

Alice Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

This Sunday is the birthday of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, the English mathematician and writer whose most famous works include Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and The Hunting of the Snark.

Such works featured Carroll’s specialty: coining blends and nonce words. We take a look at 10 of our favorites here.

boojum

“But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,
If your Snark be a Boojum!  For then
You will softly and suddenly vanish away,
And never be met with again!”

Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, 1876

The boojum is “a particularly dangerous variety of ‘snark,’” an imaginary creature of Carroll’s invention. The word boojum has inspired the naming of everything from “a species of tree. . .native to Baja California, Mexico” (found in 1922 by plant explorer Godfrey Sykes, who proclaimed, “It must be a boojum!”); to a supersonic cruise missile that “was determined to be too ambitious a project. . .and was canceled in 1951”; to “a geometric pattern sometimes observed on the surface of superfluid helium-3,” as named by physicist David Mermin in 1976.

chortle

“He chortled in his joy.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 1871

To chortle means “to exclaim exultingly, with a noisy chuckle.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Carroll coined the word as a blend of chuckle and snort.

frabjous

“‘O frabjous day!’ rejoiced Emma Dean, using her bath towel as a scarf and performing a weird dance about the room.”

Jessie Graham Flower, Grace Harlowe’s Return to Overton Campus, 1915

Frabjous means “great, wonderful, fabulous,” and is a blend of either fabulous and joyous, or fair and joyous. “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” cries the narrator of The Jabberwocky upon learning that the Jabberwock has been slain.

galumph

“I struggle to keep up on an particularly cold winter evening as I galumph my way across rough downland in pursuit of a tour guide.”

Ian Vince, “Stonehenge Landscape Can Still Surprise with Its Stunning Vistas,” The Telegraph, January 14, 2010

Galumph means “to move heavily and clumsily,” and is a blend of gallop and triumph.

jabberwocky

“In theory, the pledge could do most of the same work if we had children say it in Anglo-Saxon or Arapaho, or if we replaced it with the lyrics to ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.’ They’re going to turn the words into jabberwocky anyway.”

Geoff Nunberg, “I Pledge Allegiance to Linguistic Obfuscation,” NPR, March 30, 2010

The Jabberwocky is “a nonsensical poem that appears in Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll,” while the Jabberwock is “a fantastical dreaded monster with flaming eyes who is depicted” in the poem. Regarding the word itself, according to Carroll:

The Anglo-Saxon word ‘wocer’ or ‘wocor’ signifies ‘offspring’ or ‘fruit’. Taking ‘jabber’ in its ordinary acceptation of ‘excited and voluble discussion.’

Jabberwocky came to mean “nonsensical speech or writing” around 1908, says the OED.

mimsy

“I mean, their hair looks like it was designed on a Spirograph in the dark, then carelessly flopped on to them from atop a rickety step ladder, while their fans are all exactly the kind of mimsy mugginses who ‘Instagram’ pictures of wheelie bins to stick on their Tumblr, because, you know, it’s properly, like, photography, yeah?”

Gareth Aveyard, “This Week’s New Singles,” The Guardian, January 6, 2012

Mimsy was coined by Lewis Carroll in 1855 as a blend of miserable and flimsy. According to the OED, by 1880 mimsy also came to mean, in British English, “prim; careful; affected; feeble, weak, lightweight.” Mim is a much older word meaning “primly silent,” either imitative of the pursing up of the mouth, or coming from the Scottish Gaelic min, “delicate, meek.”

portmanteau word

“Portmanteau words are now a staple of the magazine competition, and amid the waste of failed invention, every so often one meets a need: smog, stagflation, chocoholic. I don’t know how we ever did without ‘metrosexual’, coined by my friend Mark Simpson.”

Philip Hensher, “Sarah Palin’s Struggle with the English Language,” The Telegraph, July 21, 2010

A portmanteau word is “a word formed by merging the sounds and meanings of two different words.” A portmanteau is “a case used in journeying for containing clothing,” and comes from the French porter, “to carry,” plus manteau, “cloak.”

Carroll coined portmanteau word in 1882 based on the idea of “two meanings packed up into one word,” says the Online Etymology Dictionary.

slithy

“Hearing these slithy and suggestive movements, I declined to remain any longer ignorant of their meaning.”

Ernest Raymond, Tell England: A Study in Generation, 1922

In 1855, Carroll combined slimy and lithe to form this nonce word. However, slithy as a variation of sleathy, “slovenly, careless,” has been around since 1622, says the OED.

snark

“The Snark was one of that strange man’s imaginary animals, but when novelist Heidi Julavitz used the word to describe unpleasantly critical book reviewers in her indifferently researched 2005 McSweeney’s magazine article, the word gained, as they say, ‘traction.’”

Bob Hoover, “Hunting Snarks with a Pop Gun,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 18, 2009

Snark referring to “an imaginary animal” was coined by Carroll in 1876 in his poem, The Hunting of the Snark, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. In the 1950s, snark was the “name of a type of U.S. cruise missile and in 1980s of a type of sailboat.”

The word snark also has the meaning of “to snore; to snort,” which originated about 10 years before Carroll’s imaginary animal, according to the OED. This gave rise to snarky, “rudely sarcastic or disrespectful; snide,” or “irritable or short-tempered; irascible,” around 1906, which gives us snark‘s modern meaning of “snide remarks.”

vorpal

“Because, really, there’s nothing more grandiose and theatrical than the vorpal blade. It’s the weapon of dueling gentlemen and swashbuckling adventurers, of knights in armor and the horse lords of Rohan.”

Daniel Engber, “Nerd Violence,” Slate, January 3, 2011

Vorpal meaning “sharp or deadly” was coined by Carroll in 1871. In the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, the vorpal sword is a sword “capable of decapitation, specifically through magical means,” which aligns with the plot of The Jabberwocky:

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Cea.]

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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

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]