Wordnik, a nonprofit organization, is an online English dictionary and language resource that provides

dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies ...

and

thesaurus A thesaurus (plural ''thesauri'' or ''thesauruses'') or synonym dictionary is a reference work for finding synonyms and sometimes antonyms of words. They are often used by writers to help find the best word to express an idea: Synonym diction ...

content. Some of the content is based on print dictionaries such as the ''

Century Dictionary ''The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia'' is one of the largest encyclopedic dictionaries of the English language. In its day it was compared favorably with the ''Oxford English Dictionary,'' and frequently consulted for more factual informati ...

'', the ''

American Heritage Dictionary American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

'',

WordNet WordNet is a lexical database of semantic relations between words in more than 200 languages. WordNet links words into semantic relations including synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms. The synonyms are grouped into '' synsets'' with short definition ...

, and

GCIDE GCIDE is the GNU version of Collaborative International Dictionary of English, derived from the 1913 edition of Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary and WordNet. The dictionary is released under the GNU General Public License. It describes i ...

. Wordnik has collected a

corpus Corpus is Latin for "body". It may refer to: Linguistics * Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts * Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files * Corpus linguistics, a branch of linguistics Music * ...

of billions of words which it uses to display example sentences, allowing it to provide information on a much larger set of words than a typical dictionary. Wordnik uses as many real examples as possible when defining a word.

Wiktionary Wiktionary ( , , rhyming with "dictionary") is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms (including words, phrases, proverbs, linguistic reconstructions, etc.) in all natural languages and in a number ...

, the free open dictionary project, is one major source of words and citations used by Wordnik.

History

Wordnik.com was launched as a closed beta in February 2008 and opened to all in June 2009. Cofounders of the site are CEO

Erin McKean Erin McKean (born 1971) is an American lexicographer. Early life and education McKean was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. She graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA/MA in Linguistics. As an undergraduate, she worked in a junior ...

, editorial director

Grant Barrett Grant Barrett (born 1970) is an American lexicographer, specializing in slang, jargon and new usage, and the author and compiler of language-related books and dictionaries. He is a co-host and co-producer of the American weekly, hour-long public ...

, and chief computational lexicographer Orion Montoya, and head of engineering Anthony Tam. McKean, Barrett, and Montoya all formerly worked in the US Dictionaries Department of

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...

. The startup company was originally headquartered in San Mateo, California. In September 2009, Wordnik purchased the social language site Wordie.org. All Wordie.org accounts and data were subsequently transferred to Wordnik. Wordnik's material is sourced from the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

by automatic programs. It then shows readers the information regarding a certain word without any editorial influence. Wordnik does not allow for user-contributed definitions, but seems to assert that it may allow for this in the future. In January 2011, McKean relaunched the company as Reverb Technologies, Inc. in

Palo Alto Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was estab ...

, with Wordnik co-founder Anthony Tam. Under the name Reverb, they kept operating Wordnik.com, but also expanded its technology to other services and products, including "''Reverb'' ''for Publishers''" which was a plug-in for blogs to find related articles. The company began a Kickstarter campaign in 2015 with the purpose of finding and adding a million words to Wordnik that had not yet been included in major

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

dictionaries.

Statistics

, Wordnik Zeitgeist reports that,

References

External links

* {{Dictionaries of English Online English dictionaries American websites Internet properties established in 2009 2009 establishments in the United States

History

Statistics

See also

References

External links