Wordnik’s Online Dictionary - No Arbiters, Please
TRADITIONAL print dictionaries have long enlisted lexicographers to scrutinize new words as they pop up, weighing their merits and eventually accepting some of them.
Erin McKean is a founder of Wordnik, the online dictionary.
Not Wordnik, the vast online dictionary.
No modern-day Samuel Johnson or Noah Webster ponders each prospective entry there. Instead, automatic programs search the Internet, combing the texts of news feeds, archived broadcasts, the blogosphere, Twitter posts and dozens of other sources for the raw material of Wordnik citations, says Erin McKean, a founder of the company.
Then, when you search for a word, Wordnik shows the information it has found, with no editorial tinkering. Instead, readers get the full linguistic Monty.
“We don’t pre-select and pre-prune,” she said. “We show you what’s out there now. Then we let people decide whether to use a word or not.”
At one time, she was the head of the pruners, as principal editor of the New Oxford American Dictionary. She is also an author and columnist. (She wrote “On Language” columns for The New York Times as a substitute for William Safire.)
But Ms. McKean has chosen a different path at Wordnik. “Language changes every day, and the lexicographer should get out of the way,” she said. “You can type in anything, and we’ll show you what data we have.”
When readers ask about a word, Wordnik provides definitions on the left-hand side of the screen. But it is the example sentences, featured on the right-hand side, that are crucial to a reader’s understanding of a new term, she said.
“Dictionary definitions tend to be out of date or incomplete,” she said. “Our goal is to find examples on the Web that use the word so clearly that you can understand its meaning from reading the sentence.”
To do this, the site processes a vast reservoir of language, keeping tabs on more than six million words automatically, said Tony Tam, Wordnik’s vice president for engineering. “But the numbers change every second,” he said. “It’s not a static list.”
Where does all this text come from? “You’d be amazed how fast people write articles on the Web,” he said.
Wordnik does indeed fill a gap in the world of dictionaries, said William Kretzschmar, a professor at the University of Georgia and the former president of the American Dialect Society. He provides American pronunciations for the new online Oxford English Dictionary.
“It takes time for words to get into the more formal, published dictionaries,” he said. “Wordnik is sensitive to what people are interested in now.”
Wordnik, which has raised $12.8 million in venture financing, plans to use its vast database of words and word associations at the site and in many business partnerships to be announced this year, said Joe Hyrkin, the president and C.E.O.
The products will be similar to recommendation engines, but more powerful, he said. If you like a particular book, for example, Wordnik can recommend a similar one based on its understanding of words used to describe the book, he said.
“We’re not just using tags and descriptors,” he said. “Our system understands and identifies matches at a concept level.”
The company is already providing many other word-based services, including one used on the Web site of The Times to define words in articles. Wordnik is also providing a financial glossary for smartmoney.com.