I am a Wordnik

Between blogging here and here and here, I use a lot of words every week. Sometimes it isn't easy to find the right ones, which is why the dictionary and the thesaurus are among my late-night best friends.

But the dictionary and the thesaurus are static, and the world of the blogger is dynamic. So I've been looking for something that's, well, a bit more up to date, and I think I've found it. It's called Wordnik. Along with providing the usual dictionary definitions, it adds modern context to a word by adding the latest tweets and images from Flickr and usage examples from Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg. But there's more. Wordnik is also a social network for words. If you use Facebook, you can comment on them and help expand the database.

Wordnik is the brainchild of Erin McKean, a former editor-in-chief of American dictionaries at Oxford University Press, and it looks as if I'm not the only person who likes her idea. She has already managed to raise $3.7 million from investors — in the middle of the Great Recession! Words are valuable, and Erin McKean really knows how to make the most of them.