April 25, 2011 by Erin McKean

Wordnik for Nook!

We’re thrilled to be powering the official word of the day application for the Nook Color, now available at the Nook Apps store!

Learn interesting words every day — and really understand how they’re used by seeing how they’ve been used in great books available in the Nookbooks Store. (And the app includes audio pronunciations, too!)

Interested? There’s more information here.

April 6, 2010 by Erin McKean - 1 Comment

Spring News from Wordnik

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 …

September 25, 2009 by Grant Barrett

Wordnik word of the day: heifer

Today’s word of the day is heifer, a young cow, especially one that has not yet given birth to a calf. There’s nothing too remarkable about this word. We just like cows.

Photo by Andrew Beebe under a Creative Commons license.

September 22, 2009 by Grant Barrett

Wordnik word of the day: mummock

Today’s word of the day is mummock, an old coat fit to put on a scare-crow. It’s related to mommick, a scarecrow, and mammock, a shapeless piece, a chunk, or a fragment.

September 18, 2009 by Grant Barrett

Wordnik word of the day: cashew

Today’s word of the day is cashew, the kidney-shaped seed of a tropical American evergreen tree, Anacardium occidentale.

cashews-bg
This is the fruit that contains the nut. Photo by Joao Vicente, used under a Creative Commons license.

September 17, 2009 by Grant Barrett

Wordnik word of the day: mell

Today’s word of the day is mell, meaning “to mix or to meddle,” of which it is a contracted form, and through which it is historically related to French, Spanish, and Italian words for “mix.” It is, of course, related to pell-mell.

September 16, 2009 by Grant Barrett

Wordnik word of the day: muffineer

Today’s word of the day is muffineer. An overweight cast member of The Mickey Mouse Club? No! It’s a dish in which to keep hot and from which to serve toasted muffins or crumpets. Its also sometimes a vessel of metal with a perforated cover, used to sprinkle sugar or salt on muffins. We’ve heard of salting watermelons, but salting muffins? Is that like salting a mine?*

Muffins: A co-invention of Heaven and Hell for human amusement and torture.
Photo by Ginny (ginnerobot) under a Creative Commons license.

*To salt a mine is to plant bits of precious metal in it so that some sucker thinks there’s much more than there is and then pays too much money for a worthless hole in the ground.