Wordnik - more than just a dictionary

If you've read the previous post and watched the video, you will know what Wordnik is about. As Erin McKean said in her talk, she wants to see all the words in dictionaries. And "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." So, "Wordnik wants to be a place for all the words, and everything known about them." (http://www.wordnik.com/pages/about). Wordnik is worth a visit and it will be fascinating to see how it evolves.




This is how it works. Say you look up the word "gluttonous". You'll get definitions from traditional dictionaries (American Heritage, Webster's), lots of examples from different publications, real time Twitter posts with the word, a list of related words, pronunciation and statistics of how much the word is used. For other words, you may get images too. "Our goal is to show you as much information as possible, just 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."

Wordnik is also a collaborative site - people can contribute words, pronunciations, definitions, related words, even new words they have created:

Wouldn't it be great if we had the same initiative for other languages, like Portuguese?
In any case, I think this will be excellent for those difficult words translators often have to deal with and that aren't in any dictionary.
(Found out about Wordnik from @pikorua at Twitter)