Wordnik

Smartwords aims to make readers smarter

If you've ever been immersed in a book and felt that some of its literary references were sailing over your head, a proposed software standard unveiled on Tuesday could make you a whole lot more erudite.

Known as Smartwords, the would-be standard is spearheaded by a start-up called Wordnik, and supported by media big shots like The New York Times, Forbes, the Huffington Post, O'Reilly Media, Vook, Ibis, Scribd, and the Internet Archive. The goal? To build a map of the English language, said Wordnik CEO Erin McKean.

Officially, the company refers to Smartwords as "a lightweight, … Read more

Old-school word nerds meet the digital age

Now here's one you don't see every day: Wordnik, which launched out of private beta on Monday and states its mission as "discovering all the words and everything about them." Taking the basic premise of a dictionary, Wordnik supplements each entry with Web 2.0's tastiest treats--relevant Flickr images, Twitter search matches, user-contributed tags and comments--and then invites users to add their own words, too.

Calling itself a "project" rather than a company, Wordnik's origins are sort of like a dot-com fairy tale. CEO Erin McKean, then serving as editor-in-chief of Oxford … Read more