Wordnik, a nonprofit organization, is an online English dictionary and language resource that provides dictionary and thesaurus content.[1] 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.[1][2]
 | |
Type of site | Reference (dictionary, thesaurus, etc.) |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | Wordnik Society, Inc. |
| Created by | Wordnik Society Inc. |
| URL | www |
| Registration | Optional |
| Users | 81,556 (as of 20 January 2012[update]) |
| Launched | June 2009 |
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[3][4] and opened to all in June 2009.[5] Cofounders of the site are CEO Erin McKean, editorial director Grant Barrett, and chief computational lexicographer Orion Montoya, and head of engineering Anthony Tam.[6][4] McKean, Barrett, and Montoya all formerly worked in the US Dictionaries Department of Oxford University Press.[4][7][8] The startup company was originally headquartered in San Mateo, California.[9]
In September 2009, Wordnik purchased the social language site Wordie.org. All Wordie.org accounts and data were subsequently transferred to Wordnik.[10]
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.[2] Wordnik does not allow for user-contributed definitions, but seems to assert that it may allow for this in the future.[1]
In January 2011, McKean relaunched the company as Reverb Technologies, Inc. in Palo Alto, with Wordnik co-founder Anthony Tam.[11][12][13][14]
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.[11]
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.[15]
Statistics
As of 14 January 2012[update], Wordnik Zeitgeist reports that,[16]
Wordnik is billions of words, 971,860,842 example sentences, 6,925,967 unique words, 231,628 comments, 178,718 tags, 121,432 pronunciations, 77,736 favorites and 1,022,649 words in 32,703 lists created by 81,138 Wordniks.
— Wordnik Zeitgeist