Thursday, June 11, 2009

A Time-Sink for Word-Lovers

There's a new meta-dictionary online, called Wordnik. It has definitions, usage statistics, examples, pronunciation, and other details to help writers find precisely the correct word...or spend the next two hours poking about instead of writing the next page.

Since I'm competitive, the first thing I did was look up words off of the top of my head until I found one I was the first to search for -- it was faw, as it happens. Other words no one had searched for yet included hornswoggler, pilote, and embracery. Sadly, antidisestablishmentarianism, my all-time favorite word, is not (yet?) in their dictionary.

And now I'm closing that window firmly, to get back to work.

[via GalleyCat]

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Got variadic, arity, dyadic, cumulostratus, chondrichthyes, catabolic, pyrolytic, chiropodist, devonian, taconian, lapse rate, xenophilia, parkinsonism, parkinsonian, baryton, zzyzyx, stropping, Steadicam (R), metabisulfite, greenbar, galyak, unnilhexium, and unununium (thanks IUPAC!), nyah!

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