I just added a Wordnik chiclet to the word pages. The new link has pole position, on the far left of the row of links beneath each word.

I love Wordnik’s kitchen sink approach—they have tremendous data, all of which they dump in your lap—and that they include real-time search from Twitter, which will hopefully expand to include FriendFeed and other real-time services. They* are cataloging the language as it’s being used and created, which is awesome. Each of Wordnik’s 1.7 million words has a summary page which links to detail pages for etymologies, examples, tags, and more. It’s not much to look at yet, design-wise, but the content is fabulous. Slap on a coat of varnish and it’ll be perfect.

Speaking of varnish, last night I added a new caching mechanism to Wordie, called… Varnish. Wordie is serving pages considerably faster now, and I think this will also fix an occasional issue that made the homepage molasses-slow when it was being updated during high traffic periods. The changes may have broken some stuff in the margins (like Errata, for a while—thanks to telofy for alerting me to that), so let me know if Wordie is more erratic than usual.

* “They” are celebrity lexicographers Erin McKean and Grant Barrett, on the editorial side. Wordnik is pedigreed 🙂