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Erin McKean redefines the dictionary – Wordnik

What is Wordnik?

Wordnik wants to be a place for all the words, and everything known about them.

Our goal is to show you as much information as possible, as fast as we can find it, for every word in English, and to give you a place where you can make your own opinions about words known.

Traditional dictionaries make you wait until they’ve found what they consider to be "enough" information about a word before they will show it to you. Wordnik knows you don’t want to wait—if you’re interested in a word, we’re interested too!

By "information," we don’t just mean traditional definitions (although we have plenty of those)! This information could be:

What Kind of Data is Available?

You can get immediate access to the following information through our API:

• Definitions from the The Century Dictionary
• Frequency data reflecting occurrences in our alpha API corpus
• Example sentences for words
• An autocomplete service
• Access to our Word of the Day

This list will grow weekly so please follow the Twitter updates and watch for emails to the email address we have for your Wordnik account.

Who was behind the Wordnik

Erin McKean’s job as a lexicographer involves living in a constant state of research. She searches high and low — from books to blogs, newspapers to cocktail parties — for new words, new meanings for old words, or signs that old words have fallen out of use. In June of this year she involved us all in the search by launching Wordnik, an online dictionary that houses all the traditionally accepted words and definitions, but also asks users to contribute new words and new uses for old words. Wordnik pulls real-time examples of word usage from Twitter, image representations from Flickr along with many more non-traditional, and highly useful, features.

Before Wordnik, McKean was one of the youngest editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary . She continues to serve as the editor of the language quarterly  Verbatim("language and linguistics for the layperson since 1974") and is the author of multiple books, including That’s Amore and the entire Weird and Wonderful Words series. All that, and she maintains multiple blogs, too: McKean is the keen observationalist behind A Dress a Day and Dictionary Evangelist. Is there anything she can’t do? Surprisingly, she is notoriously bad at Scrabble.

Where to Go Next (for developers)

The best place to start is to check out their sample code on their public GitHub repository:

git://github.com/wordnik/api-examples.git

Note that for any access to the API you’ll first need an approved API key!