Tag Archives: new stuff

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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.]

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Spring News from Wordnik

in just-spring

Photo by, and licensed (CC BY-NC 2.0) from, cuellar.

Spring is always a time for new growth, and we’re certainly growing here at Wordnik!

Some new stuff we think you’d like:

  • We now have a beta mobile site at http://m.wordnik.com, optimized for small-screen devices.
  • We have more new (and better!) example sentences, from new sources, with more on the way soon.
  • Check out our improved word frequency charts!
  • The Wordnik Word of the Day is now available as a daily email. You can sign up for it now by logging in to Wordnik and editing your preferences.
  • Our new autoexpanding comment areas make it easier to write and edit comments of more than a few lines (for when you have a lot to say about a particular word).
  • You’ll find improved definition data from the GNU Webster’s 1913 dictionary, available both on the site and through the API.
  • Developers, check out the New API calls for retrieving examples, related words (synonyms, antonyms, and the like), phrases, and definitions by part of speech. Support for JSONP is now available as well.
  • Our corpus is now using mongodb under the hood, providing improved performance now, and interesting feature possibilities down the road.
  • And just for fun, follow us on Twitter and Facebook to play SECRET WORD WEDNESDAY! Guess the SECRET WORD OF THE DAY, and win Wordnik stickers!

Hungry for more? Email us at feedback@wordnik.com and let us know what you’d like to see!

Also — for all you developers out there, keep an eye out for details of Wordnik’s first developer contest! We’ll be making an announcement this Friday …

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Wordnik & Wordie: Moving Day!

So we’ve unpacked all the Wordie boxes and all the data is moved in and put away nicely, so everything should be ready for Wordniks and Wordies to live together in peace and harmony.

If you’re a Wordie, in the vast majority of the cases your Wordnik username is the same as your Wordie username — to start using Wordnik, all you have to do is reset your password with this link. All your tags, lists, comments, and coolness will magically show up on Wordnik under your username.

A few Wordies and Wordniks had the same usernames — great minds think alike — so we staged a few contests of luck and skill to determine which person grabbed the prize. If your username was affected, you’ll get an email soon with your new username and a link to reset your password. (Again, all your data will show up on Wordnik under your new username.)

If we were pretty sure you were the same person on Wordie and Wordnik (same username, same or suspiciously similar email addresses) we merged the accounts. (Log in with your Wordnik password.) If it was merely a case of mistaken identity and you are now living with a stranger, let us know ASAP!

This was a BIG undertaking (kind of like docking the space shuttle, only without the triumphant classical-music soundtrack), so if you notice any wonkiness, please let us know. We’ll be doing a bit more polishing and dusting over the next couple of days to make extra-double-sure that everything is where it’s supposed to be and does what it is supposed to do!

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What Does Your Wordnik Profile Say About You?

What kind of Wordnik are you? Now you can find out by taking a look at your Wordnik profile!


Your Wordnik profile (which is available whenever you’re logged in) shows you (and only you — it’s private) how many words you’ve looked up, and the most recent words you’ve looked up, tagged, left notes about, recorded pronunciations for, and declared to be your favorites!


When you’re logged in, your profile page will help you keep track of cool words you’ve found or the words you frequently misspell.


To find your profile page, click on your username in the upper right-hand corner of the site. (Never logged in? Join today!)


Hap E Wordnik's username


And if you’ve logged in with Facebook Connect, we’ll even show you your user picture (just in case you’ve been spending so much time at Wordnik that you’ve forgotten what you look like).


While putting the profiles together, we thought we identified some Wordnik types …


The Enthusiast: has lots of words marked as favorites. (Enthusiasts like to tweet their new favorites, too!)


The Organizer: has tagged lots of words. Organizers’ tags range from the purely informational (consecutivevowels) to the editorial (funnysounding) to the just plain funny (apersonwhoeatsonlyvegetarians).


The Explainer: leaves a lot of helpful notes. (Or funny notes, which are also helpful in their way.)


The Announcer: records a lot of pronunciations. (Or finds them online and does some kind of prestidigitation to add them to Wordnik. Check out the one by “Vizzini” here.)


Soon we’ll be adding even more information to your profile pages, including your complete browsing history and some fun ways to compare yourself to other Wordniks. (A hint: start trying to score those Wordniks now …)


At Wordnik, our plan is to give you as much information as we can about as many words as we can — and that includes information about your own word use. Please let us know what else you’d like your profile to keep track of for you!

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New Stuff at Wordnik!

Over the last few days we’ve added a couple new things to Wordnik that we hope you’ll like — first, autocomplete! (Quite a few people have requested this.) Now, when you start typing in the search box, you’ll see a list of suggestions.


What would you suggest?


We’ve also added a “forms” graph. What’s a forms graph? A forms graph tells you stuff like this:


is it Internet or internet?
In our data, upper-case “Internet” is still slightly more common than lower-case “internet”.


We’ve also started showing you words used in the same contexts as the word you’ve looked up. These are the words that we’ve found to be used in the same contexts as the word wry:


Those who are wry are also ... ?
These are words that aren’t necessarily synonymous, but words that are used in the same way in the same kinds of sentences. Have a word on the tip of your tongue? Check out our same-context list for a word that describes the same kind of thing as the word you can’t think of. Something that is described as wry (like a sense of humor or a comment) might very well also be called sardonic.


At Wordnik, our plan is to give you as much information as we can about as many words as we can — please let us know how useful you find it!