Wordnik

Wordnik.com is an online English dictionary and language resource that provides dictionary and thesaurus content, some of it based on print dictionaries such as the Century Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary, WordNet, and GCIDE. Wordnik has collected a corpus of billions of words which it uses to display example sentences, allowing it to provide information on a much larger set of words than a typical dictionary.

Wiktionary, the free open dictionary project, is one major source of words and citations used by Wordnik.

History

Wordnik.com was launched as a closed beta in March 2009 and opened to all comers in June 2009. Co-founders of the site are CEO Erin McKean, editorial director Grant Barrett, and chief computational lexicographer Orion Montoya. McKean, Barrett, and Montoya all formerly worked in the US Dictionaries Department of Oxford University Press. In September 2009, Wordnik purchased social language site Wordie.org. All Wordie.org accounts and data were subsequently transferred to Wordnik.