Language Trainers Blog

I’ve recently found the website Wordnik, which I would struggle just to call an online dictionary. It not only collects definitions from well-known dictionaries, but it provides example phrases and sentences (including online publications, blogs, and tweets), pronunciations, tags, statistics, and a strong user-generated component. It even gives you the potential Scrabble score (if it is a valid Scrabble word). People can create lists of words based around themes, so if you look up a word, you can immediately see what other words and phrases it is commonly found with. There is also a pretty well-used comments feature.

For example, I clicked random word, and got raptured. Raptured, meaning in a state of rapture, has a Scrabble score of 11, was most popular in the early 1800s (and the present, possibly because of religious connotations), and has one related photo on Flickr.

For prescriptivists, Wordnik‘s resident pronunciation specialist (or orthoepist) provides his own pronunciations for nearly 1800 words (to date), and for descriptivists, any member of the site can upload their own audio. Edit: if you’d like orthoepist Charles Harrington Elster to pronounce something for you, add your word to The Request Line.

For the average dictionary user, this may be far too much information, but for those of us who are interested in seeing how language is used today (and how it was used in the past), this is a wonderful resource. I’d be interested to see if the concept will be extended to other languages, as well.

Check out the Zeitgeist to see what’s happening on the site. As of today:

Wordnik is billions of words, 828,852,001 example sentences, 6,458,204 unique words, 209,445 comments, 146,866 tags, 76,745 pronunciations, 46,119 favorites and 864,672 words in 27,830 lists created by 60,337 Wordniks.

In what surely is a sign of the imminent downfall of modern society, Sarah Palin’s non-word refudiate has been named New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2010. Apparently, the combination of refute and repudiate has a slightly different meaning from either word, as the Oxford University Press blog says:

From a strictly lexical interpretation of the different contexts in which Palin has used “refudiate,” we have concluded that neither “refute” nor “repudiate” seems consistently precise, and that “refudiate” more or less stands on its own, suggesting a general sense of “reject.”

Although Palin is likely to be forever branded with the coinage of “refudiate,” she is by no means the first person to speak or write it—just as Warren G. Harding was not the first to use the word normalcy when he ran his 1920 presidential campaign under the slogan “A return to normalcy.” But Harding was a political celebrity, as Palin is now, and his critics spared no ridicule for his supposedly ignorant mangling of the correct word “normality.”

Just because it has been named the word of the year (and, granted, a lot of people did talk about it), and it has a definition (refudiate verb used loosely to mean “reject” [origin — blend of refute and repudiate]), it doesn’t mean it will be added to the dictionary any time soon. Check back in a few years’ time, though!

October 16 is Dictionary Day! In honour of Noah Webster (left, of Merriam-Webster Dictionary fame), who was born on October 16, 1758, today is a day to celebrate dictionaries, improving vocabulary, and language in general.

Look up some new words, find another way to say an everyday phrase, pick up a print dictionary and appreciate its pages.

If you’re at a loss, try a random word generator, or follow @langtrainers on Twitter for a new word every day.

Happy Dictionary Day!

It really doesn’t feel like it, but I’ve just noticed that my last post was the 300th one on this blog (and I guess it could have been more positive, but oh well). Not that the quantity should make a big difference, but I do like nice round numbers. Of course, this post makes 301, so now I have to wait until I’ve done 99 more.

In the meantime, did you know that the OED does quarterly updates of their online dictionary? I didn’t. The most recent (and 34th) update was on the 16th of September, and it included a review of the words from rod to rotness, as well as the addition of some miscellaneous words from around the alphabet.

Some of my favourite added words are borek (a delicious Turkish pastry), eggcorn (a misheard word), goji (a type of berry), and parkour (that crazy thing some people do where they try to get from one place to another in the most difficult way possible. Also added was the now ubiquitous iPod.

Wishing you many new, exciting words, and language goals achieved!