Worknik is way, way more than an online dictionary.
It started as the web’s first word navigation system. The site grew into a community of bloggers and word-lovers. Now, while keeping its consumer audience, Wordnik is expanding to meet growing interest from content publishers and businesses that want to add value to their content and engage more closely with their users.
Wordniks can share their favorite words and make lists of top words in categories. Community members can “like” words as their favorite, creating a social network of word lovers and word users. The site shows definitions from multiple sources, giving users different takes on a word’s meaning.
“Word of the Day” is a popular feature, and today’s word (April 19, 2012) is “crapulence.” It may not be what you think. Still, this is a fine word, though it does not apply to Worknik, our other sponsors, WordCamp Nashville 2012, our speakers, attendees and volunteers, or WordPress. At all.
Crapulence is a noun defined this way by Wikitionary: “Intemperance; debauchery; excessive indulgence.” Century Dictionary and Cylcopedia says this: “Drunkenness; a surfeit, or the sickness following drunkenness.”
“The word ‘crapulence’ attests to the 1650s, and comes from the Latin ‘crapula,’ excessive drinking,” Wordnik says. “The word also has a modern sense of the state of being crappy or inferior.”
Wordnik has a developer community, too.
It has used its site to brand its API framework and has a host of apps for mobile devices and desktops. “The Week in Words” for The Wall Street Journal and similar features in other prominent publications, in print and online, are Wordnik-powered.
Take a survey to sign up for some beta features as they’re released. As of April 19, Wordnik described itself as “billions of words, 984,433,066 example sentences, 6,898,870 unique words, 232,414 comments, 179,268 tags, 121,454 pronunciations, 79,170 favorites and 1,044,091 words in 33,387 lists created by 84,667 Wordniks.”
Our word of the day is “awesome.”
