Wordnik’s Word Pages: now with 86.5% more resplendence

We’re happy to announce today a new look for the (millions and millions of) Wordnik word pages:

The new pages are cleaner, easier to navigate and read, more colorful, and have been shown in controlled, double-blind experiments to increase the love of words, writing and speaking skills, and vocabulary retention by up to 115% in test subjects*.

New features include an expanded Related Word (thesaurus) section, with a new “Reverse Dictionary” section:

screenshot of related words at "better"

Word pages now include list previews, so you can easily see information about the lists that include the word you’ve looked up:

We’ll be rolling out more improvements and more new features across all of Wordnik.com over the next few weeks. As always, you can send us your thoughts via feedback@wordnik.com or by leaving a comment here.

[*test subjects may or may not have been Wordnik employees and their families.]

Cricket!

Cricket!

Photo by, and licensed (C BY-NC-SA 2.0) from, kkseema.

At Wordnik, we love all the words (that’s what the heart in the logo means, after all) but there are some words that are especial favorites (that’s what the favorite function is for, after all) … and quite a few of those words are cricketing terms. Only a couple of Wordniks can honestly claim to be true cricket fans (Krishna and Kumanan) but none of us can resist the lure of words like googly (“A googly is a ball delivered by a bowler that looks as if it ought to break from left to right across the bat of a right-handed batsman.”) and Dilscoop (” … [the] stroke “Dilscoop” [ invented by Tilakaratne Dilshan] which involves going down on one knee and scooping the ball over his head in area behind the wicketkeeper.”) Not to mention the best phrase in all of sports: silly mid-off. (Which is the same as the silly mid-on, just on the other side of the pitch. Make sense? No? Well, it doesn’t matter.)

Cricket words are so compelling, in fact, that Wordnik has three different lists devoted to cricket! They are: Sportie: Cricket, i don’t like cricket — i love it, and Cricket! That last link is to an open list — feel free to add your own favorite cricket terms to it!

Is there some other topic that you think has better words than cricket? You can always sign in to Wordnik and create your own list of great words to share …