Wordnik: The Dictionary Redefined
Exploring the Word Wide Web, or what Dr. Seuss can teach us about linguistic snobbery.
In 2007, lexicographer Erin McKean gave a TED talk that left many speechless with its keen insight about the evolution of language and the shortcomings of traditional dictionaries. This month, McKean launched Wordnik, her long-awaited solution to the problems she outlined in her talk.
Wordnik is an ongoing project out to discover all the words and all there is to know about them.
A crowdsourced toolkit for tracking and recording the evolution of language as it occurs, its goal is to gather as much information about a word as possible — not its mere definition, but also in-sentence examples, semantic “neighborhoods” of related words, images, statistics about usage, and more. And it’s all compiled via user submissions.
Besides the makings of a next-gen dictionary, Wordnik is a refuge for linguistic underdogs and etymological rejects alike — and we love it. Because why should some stuffy Brit in his Oxford cubicle raise a disapproving eyebrow at the real language real people use and tell us that “brainpicker” isn’t actually a word?
Anyone who’s read a children’s book knows that love makes things real. If you love a word, use it. That makes it real. Being in the dictionary is an artificial distinction. [McKean @ TED]
For the full, straight-from-the-source scoop on Wordnik, check out this excellent interview with McKean on the TED Blog.
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Unintentional typo in the pull-quote (”us it” instead of “use it”) actually conveys an interesting notion, the idea of making a word everyone’s, having it belong to “us.”
Ha, Dave, this is great. I was tempted not to fix it (although I had to, given it’s a quote). Perhaps a fascinating cognitive slip after my brain had been processing the collaborative aspect of the project for so long.
[...] and it’s now gone live (in beta) as Wordnik (great name). In the words of Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, “A crowdsourced toolkit for tracking and recording the evolution of language as it occurs, [...]