Bookraft

Cant say I like the name of the site - Wordnik resembles beatnik and suggests a slight obsessiveness about words that is discomforting but I digress. In fact Wordnik turns out to be a wonderful word resource:


Sample word look up at Wordnik


Forget looking up words at Google or Websters - this is the place to go to find all sorts of things about words dished out to you on the front page - no clicking around to get at a scrumptuous mot's morsels. As seen in the screenshot there are usually 3 or 4 dictionaries supplying definitions for most common words and a set of examples of the word usage. Novelty - from Twitter comes real-time examples of the use of the words [see the lower left corner of the screenshot]. Of course there is that algebra of the mind known as a pronunciation guide. Its bad enough that English is perverse in its sounding rulings [all my Sesame Street knowledge gone wrong] ... but having to make out the sounding hieroglyphs - now that is torture]. At the top of the screen a button press gets you to Etymologies and Related words.

But Wordnik makes up for its pronunciation gibberish with two nifty gifts. Statistics, which trails off at the right bottom of the screenshot, are not to be ignored. This section provides a statistical history of the words usage. This is fascinating; but still a bit iffy as the site is new and for many words user see the notice - "We are still working on calculating this word's frequency. Check back soon for updates!". The next goody is a bit of a bite of sideways and screwball called Serendipity - the stuff of alliteration and spontaneous lexical combustion. I love to see what words are tossed at me in this section - and find in poetically inspiring. In fact I can say the same for the site in general - a great love of words works well here.