I've got an amazing announcement: Wordie is going to become part of Wordnik.com, as am I. Wordnik is built by and for word freaks and is teh alsome; it's hard to imagine a better partner for Wordie. I'm ecstatic about this, and I'm sure we'll fit right in*.

For the time being what this means to you, the social word lover, is... nothing. Both sites will chug along while we plan their integration. Then in the not-too-distant future Wordnik will receive a facelift, and either as part of that or immediately subsequent to it Wordie will be formally incorporated into Wordnik.

Making lists, adding words to lists, and commenting on lists and words will remain core features and free, from now until the sun expands into a red giant, extinguishing all earthly life that hasn't escaped the bounds of the solar system. Your Wordie identity will travel with you into Wordnik, as will your lists, your words, and your comments**. We will go to extreme lengths to ensure that Wordnik is infused with all that is good about Wordie.

Integration will be greatly eased by the fact that the two sites are eerily well-aligned: Wordie has few real lexicographic features (hi Weirdnet!) and will greatly benefit from the corpus humongous and sprawling lexicographical fantasia that is Wordnik. And Wordnik's social features are, at the moment, few.

Hey kids, let's build a dictionary!

The most exciting aspect of this is that we will now get a voice in building the mother and father of all dictionaries. Wordnik already has a tremendous amount of data, but it's still at the beginning stages of an audacious project: to catalog all the English words that ever were and ever will be, to watch and listen to the language as it is created and evolves, and to talk about it while that happens. Because we're joining forces early in the process of figuring out what a lexicographically rich, highly social dictionary-of-the-future can be, it gives those of us who care the opportunity to have our voices heard. You can start talking about what you'd like to see Wordnik become and how Wordie should fit into it in the comments below, or anywhere on Wordie (like Wordnik, for instance). And of course you can always email me.

Thank you.

I'm weak in the knees that I'll now get to spend all day doing what I've previously had to relegate to nights and weekends, and I want to thank my new best friends at Wordnik for inviting me to the party. But most of all I'd like to thank all the Wordie regulars for turning Wordie from a small joke into a place I love, an avocation, and now something bigger. It's amazing: I launched a very crude container and you guys filled it not just with words and lists, but with wit and erudition and good cheer. I am eternally, profoundly grateful.

You can email your thoughts, concerns, and suggestions to john@wordnik.com (john@wordie.org will always work too). I think this is going to be fun.

* Here's Erin's post on Wordnik.
** We're working on a feature that lets you bring them with you into the afterlife.

Labels: Wordnik.com

I just added a Wordnik chiclet to the word pages. The new link has pole position, on the far left of the row of links beneath each word.

I love Wordnik's kitchen sink approach—they have tremendous data, all of which they dump in your lap—and that they include real-time search from Twitter, which will hopefully expand to include FriendFeed and other real-time services. They* are cataloging the language as it's being used and created, which is awesome. Each of Wordnik's 1.7 million words has a summary page which links to detail pages for etymologies, examples, tags, and more. It's not much to look at yet, design-wise, but the content is fabulous. Slap on a coat of varnish and it'll be perfect.

Speaking of varnish, last night I added a new caching mechanism to Wordie, called... Varnish. Wordie is serving pages considerably faster now, and I think this will also fix an occasional issue that made the homepage molasses-slow when it was being updated during high traffic periods. The changes may have broken some stuff in the margins (like Errata, for a while—thanks to telofy for alerting me to that), so let me know if Wordie is more erratic than usual.

* "They" are celebrity lexicographers Erin McKean and Grant Barrett, on the editorial side. Wordnik is pedigreed :-)

Labels: Erin McKean, errata, Grant Barrett, telofy, Wordnik.com

You can't buy this, sadly (it's "art"), but it's wonderful. I hope the books correspond to the states in which they're shelved, though that would make Maine illiterate, which we know isn't the case. Thanks to kad, who first saw it on ohdeedoh.com.

Labels: best, bookshelf, map, usa

Yesterday chandas tweeted one of the more technically awkward web pages I've seen in a while, but the content is great. It appears to be a rather large dictionary of bird names, saved as a single html page from a Microsoft Word file. It's all text with no images or links, there's no obvious indication of who wrote or compiled it (it's hosted on the Weisblum Lab Antibiotics Webpage, where it's linked to as "Arthur Smith's Bird Dictionary"), and it weighs in at a browser-crashing 12 MB.

Once you get past that it's chockablock with good stuff—bird names and their synonyms starting with Aasvogel (“the name for the larger vultures by the Dutch colonists in Africa”) and ending with Zeldonia, the generic name for the Wrenthrush. The whole thing is a good potential source for some of the better bird lists on Wordie.

UPDATE: This one must be making the rounds. Language Hat blogged it a few days ago.

Labels: birds, chandas, chockablock, dictionaries

A little Friday fantasia: in September of 2007 Curious Expeditions collected dozens of pictures of stunning old libraries in a post titled Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries, which was just sent to me by my old pal Magnolia. They're incredible.

I've spent my entire life surrounded either by clean-lined modernism or an almost equally spare New England aesthetic, and it's startling to be reminded that baroque and rococo (barococo?) confections like this were ever built, let alone on this scale and in such profusion. Likewise, information is now so ubiquitous, and incorporeal, and cheap, it's jolting to think of a time when it was rare, and heavy, and expensive, and so justified the building of palaces like this to contain it.

Curious Expeditions says they'll leave it to someone else to post a list of beautiful modern libraries, like Louis Kahn's library at Exeter. If anyone knows of one, please let us know in the comments.

Labels: books, library, Magnolia

BoingBoing has a short but sweet post (the comments are worth reading too), sent to me by harrisj and mentioned on Wordie by VanishedOne, about the death-tinged tone of journalism jargon. Beat, kill (sometimes for a fee), morgue, widow, orphan, slug, bullet. I'm guessing this stems more from the sometimes bleak nature of what journalists cover than the overwhelmingly bleak current state of the industry—these are old terms, after all. They might also have roots in the noirish self-image a lot of newspaper people have of themselves: secretly every jschool grad from the 'burbs wishes he or she was Bogart in "Deadline U.S.A."

Some other good journalism lists on Wordie: newspaper names*, this one of tabloid phrases, and my own short list of tabloid headlines, which could use a shot in the arm**.

* Consistently the most common source of search traffic to the site.
** It's an open list, so feel free.

Labels: BoingBoing, Jacob Harris, journalism, newspapers

Carl Malamud is the "rebel archivist" who has been working for years to make government documents freely available, and he has started a campaign to be appointed Public Printer of the United States, head of the Government Printing Office. Malamud says he's inspired by Augustus E. Giegengack, "a working printer and regular leather apron man" who FDR appointed to head the GPO after a similar grassroots effort.

Malamud's background is ideal for the position, and his appointment would go a long way towards furthering Obama's campaign pledge to increase transparency in government. For more info and to offer your support, visit Malamud's delightfully-named campaign site, Yes We Scan!

Labels: Carl Malamud, GPO, Yes We Scan

I just discovered that After Deadline, an internal New York Times newsletter on language and writing, is also adapted for inclusion in the Times Topics blog. The most recent post is on murky language and overstuffed sentences, and there's a nice stash of earlier posts on grammar, usage, words, and other things language-related.

Among them is a piece on the rise of the word we love to hate, the s-word. Even if it pains you to see it in print, the post has some interesting statistics on the rise of this scourge word, which, amazingly, wasn't used in the Times a single time in 1980, and only once in 1985 (by my nemesis, William Safire). Usage crept up through the ninteies, and set a record last year with over 40 appearances. The author, Philip B. Corbet, doesn't offer any theories about the source of the plague, though he does suggest it's time to give it a rest. Here's to hoping it goes the way of the Bush administration.

Labels: language, New York Times, s-word

Trevor Butterworth is the editor of the absolutely fantastic STATS.org blog, which has been my favorite media watchdog publication for the past few years. They post authoritatively on topics like media coverage of health issues and the use and abuse of statistics, and happily their quantitative bent is accompanied by a joy in language, particularly of the so-bad-it's-good variety.

Last month Trevor posted a Wordie list, subtitled Econorrhea, of neologisms and portmanteaux having to do with the economic implosion, which he has now worked into a Jabberwocky parody* on Recessionwire—which is itself compiling the beginnings of what could be something fun: a recession lexicon. It's all worth checking out, in particular STATS.

* Check the comments too: he's being pursued by the Lewis Caroll Society.

Labels: Econorrhea, Jabberwocky, Recessionwire, STATS.org, Trevor Butterworth

So, I've been the worst blogger ever. Got my head turned by Twitter, other parts of life flared up, and next thing I know I haven't posted to Errata in over four months.

This is a tentative step towards getting back on the bike. I spent this weekend refactoring some of the innards of poor neglected Wordie. The results of this ongoing effort will be largely invisible, and mostly for my own benefit--some of the internals were written in such haste that now, months or years later, what's going on under the hood is a little hazy, even to me. So I'm reorganizing internals*, fixing a few longstanding bugs, and along the way hopefully improving performance, to handle the slow, steady increase in traffic Wordie continues to see. Once I've cleaned house I'll be in a much better position to start adding some new features.

One small feature you can see right now is a new link to Forvo.com under each word. Forvo is sort of like Wordie--user submitted words--but it focuses on audio pronunciations, rather than, uh, whatever it is that Wordie focuses on. Click the last little square under antipodes for an example. It'll bring you to a page on Forvo where you can hear the proper Canadian pronunciation of the word.

* For those who care, I'm also bolting on, after the fact, a proper test suite, having recently gotten the TDD religion.

Labels: Forvo, Twitter, worst