New Age Dictionary
No, the title of this post doesn’t refer to a guide for those interested in all things metaphysical. It is about a new website, Wordnik.com.
This site, still in beta, provides a dictionary that includes definitions, uses the word in context and provides pictures and even videos of the word. So what’s terribly new about this? It’s that this site allows people to contribute definitions, text containing the word, pictures and even videos. (This reminds me somewhat of how the original Oxford English dictionary was compiled, as for that dictionary, which was inclusive rather than exclusive, the authors attempted to find and include all known uses of a word. You can read about the development of the Oxford English dictionary in “The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary” by Simon Winchester).
Of course, I had to look up a few words. I tried ‘geek’ and found some interesting Pictures of people (ok, that’s an understatement. What I found were pictures of some really strange/scary individuals. All the more so because I think I have worked with a couple of them on proposal efforts!). I then entered the word “proposals”. Interestingly, one of the pictures under proposals was a ‘Wordle’ (Jon spoke about this cool application in a previous post!)
It’s obvious this site is new and it’s difficult to tell if it will last, but, as words are our business, it’s worth checking out and keeping an eye on it.
This article was written by BJ on 13 July, 2009 and filed under Word play & writing. If you found it useful, you can with others. To receive automatic updates, subscribe to The Proposal Guys via 
RSS or 
Email.
3 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Here’s another dictionary type site for you to take a look at. It’s the coolest presentation of a dictionary I have seen and I thought you would enjoy it, too.
http://www.visuwords.com/
My favorite website for writing resources is http://www.refdesk.com, it has every reference you can think of in one place.
Simon Winchester rocks! The Professor and the Madman (another about the OED), and The Map That Changed the World are a couple more of his excellent books.