Wordnik

Wordnik.com
Type of site
 Reference (dictionary, thesaurus, etc.)
Available in English
Owner Wordnik Society, Inc.
Created by Wordnik Society Inc.
Website www.wordnik.com
Alexa rank 21,469 (as of October 2015)[1]
Registration Optional
Users 81,556 (as of 20 January 2012)
Launched June 2009

Wordnik, a nonprofit organization, is an online English dictionary and language resource that provides dictionary and thesaurus content.[2] Some of the content is based on print dictionaries such as the Century Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary, WordNet, and GCIDE. Wordnik has collected a corpus 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.[2][3]

Wiktionary, 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[4][5] and opened to all in June 2009.[6] Co-founders of the site are CEO Erin McKean, editorial director Grant Barrett, and chief computational lexicographer Orion Montoya, and head of engineering Anthony Tam.[7][5] McKean, Barrett, and Montoya all formerly worked in the US Dictionaries Department of Oxford University Press.[5][8][9] The startup company was originally headquartered in San Mateo, California. [10]

In September 2009, Wordnik purchased the social language site Wordie.org. All Wordie.org accounts and data were subsequently transferred to Wordnik.[11]

Wordnik's material is sourced from the internet by automatic programs. It then shows readers the information regarding a certain word without any editorial influence.[3] Wordnik does not allow for user-contributed definitions but seems to assert that it may allow for this in the future.[2]

In January 2011, McKean relaunched the company as Reverb Technologies, Inc. in Palo Alto, with Wordnik co-founder Anthony Tam.[12][13][14][15]

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.[12]

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.[16]

Statistics

As of 14 January 2012, Wordnik Zeitgeist reports that,[17]

References

  1. ↑ "wordnik.com Site Info". Alexa Internet, Inc. Retrieved 7 October 2015.
  2. 1 2 3 "Wordnik". Wordnik.com. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  3. 1 2 Eisenberg, Anne (2011-12-31). "Wordnik's Online Dictionary: No Arbiters, Please". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  4. ↑ "Wordnik is becoming a not-for-profit! | Wordnik". blog.wordnik.com. Retrieved 2018-06-23.
  5. 1 2 3 "Erin McKean launches Wordnik – the revolutionary online dictionary". TED Blog. 2009-06-08.
  6. ↑ "Old-School Word Nerds Meet The Digital Age". CBS News. 2009-06-08.
  7. ↑ "I Went From Working on Dictionaries to Tech". 2018-03-14. Retrieved 2018-06-23. In 2008 McKean founded Wordnik, the world’s largest online English dictionary (in terms of the number of words)
  8. ↑ "Online dictionary is lexicography's answer to the Swiss Army knife". Calgary Herald. 2009-06-12.
  9. ↑ Ali, Rafat (2009-07-08). "Online Dictionary Site Wordnik Gets $3.7 Million Funding". Washington Post.
  10. ↑ "Xconomy: The Web's Last Word on Words". Xconomy. 2011-10-26. Retrieved 2018-06-23.
  11. ↑ "Wordnik & Wordie: Moving Day!". Official Wordnik Blog. 2009-11-11.
  12. 1 2 "Xconomy: If You Like Jennifer Aniston, You Won't Like This Article About Reverb". Xconomy. 2013-03-12. Retrieved 2018-06-23.
  13. ↑ "Reverb Technologies". MongoDB. Retrieved 2018-06-23. Reverb Technologies Vice President of Engineering and Technical Co-founder Tony Tam
  14. ↑ "APIs with Swagger : An Interview with Reverb's Tony Tam". InfoQ. Retrieved 2018-06-23.
  15. ↑ "Reverb Technologies Inc - Palo Alto , CA - Company Page". www.dandb.com. Retrieved 2018-06-23. Founded: 2011. Location: Palo Alto, CA 94301. Contacts: Erin McKean. Employees: 5.
  16. ↑ "Let's Add a Million Missing Words to the Dictionary". Kickstarter. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  17. ↑ "Wordnik Zeitgeist". Wornik, Inc. Retrieved 2012-01-14.
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