Well, they say it isn’t anyway. Before I go any further, here’s the link. This will take you to Wordnik, the latest online collaborative, er, dictionary on the internet. Is it any good? Well, sort of. Like anything hip and happening these days, it’s a wiki-like thing, something that anyone may edit and change as they see fit, which also displays auto-generated content from various ‘social’ sites, and definitions from dictionaries on your chosen word.
Side note: Some of you may have wondered what the word ‘wiki’ actually means. Read on. A chap called Ward Cunningham began developing a simple, collaborative online database in around 1994. He wanted it to be quick and easy to use and edit, so anyone could easily contribute to the web pages created by his database software. He christened his development the wiki-wiki web (www, get it?). ‘Wiki’ itself is a contraction of the Hawaiian word wiki-wiki, meaning ‘quick’ or ‘fast’. Nowadays, with global search engine domination by Wikipedia, the name is firmly embedded in the history of the internet.
Back to Wordnik. On the whole, it appears to be quite a comprehensive resource. 1.7 million words grace its database, apparently. If you search for a word, then look in the top right-hand corner, you’ll see that “more than 10,000 of Wordnik’s 1.7 million” have been looked up so far. It will give you the number of times the word has been looked up as well. Now, the fact that less than 10% of all the words had ever been searched for sounded like a challenge to me, so I tried a few for size. To my dismay, I was not the first to look up coprolite, tectonic, spelunking, or mensch. Undeterred, I pressed on until I realized it knew all the words I did – and obviously a great deal more. Most irritating.
What makes it different from a dictionary? It takes references from leading (US English) dictionaries and displays their entries, as well as the entry (if applicable) from one of my personal faves, the Princeton WordNet. Other sections are not so helpful. The bubble chart, denoting the word’s popularity and usage statistics over time is pretty but useless. The Flickr photo streams are frankly pointless, as the results depend on what people have tagged their pictures with. If I had a pet hamster called ‘yclept’ and had posted him on Flickr, there’s a good chance he’d end up on the Wordnik page. Equally pointless is the real-time twitter ‘tweets’ display. Given that one has but 140 characters on twitter in which to summarize one’s actions, it doesn’t really provide much in the way of usable examples.
On the up side, there are etymologies, if available, and real-world examples – many of which are taken from Project Gutenberg ebooks. As it’s a collaborative affair, if you don’t like the (usually American) audio pronunciation of the word, you can record your own.
If you don’t mind the fluff and the pizzazz, this can be a very interesting and useful site. Anything that makes words fun for the internet generation can be no bad thing, in my opinion. At least Wordnik is putting the ‘fun’ into functional, without compromizing the integrity of the resources from which it draws its definitions.
Is it a dictionary? Well, yeah, it is.
