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 Alphabetical order, alphabetically (or by Semitic root, consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical-and-stroke sorting, radical an ...

and

thesaurus A thesaurus (: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar me ...

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. It was compared favorably with the ''Oxford English Dictionary,'' and frequently consulted for more factual information than woul ...

'', 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, p ...

'',

WordNet WordNet is a lexical database of semantic relations between words that links words into semantic relations including synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms. The synonyms are grouped into ''synsets'' with short definitions and usage examples. It can thu ...

, and GCIDE. Wordnik has collected a

corpus Corpus (plural ''corpora'') 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 ...

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 o ...

, 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, editorial director Grant Barrett, 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 publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press 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 network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

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 language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

, 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 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