Wordnik, The New Wikipedia?

How ironic that one of first truly innovative search engine to come a long in the past 5 years started out as little more than the new millenniums contemporary version of a dictionary. Wordnik, which launched Monday as the brainchild of Erin McKean, provides contextual information about words and their definitions. The project states its mission as “discovering all the words and everything about them” which it does by providing realtime search results from Twitter, the web, Flickr and it’s own database off definitions. Here’s what a typical word search on Wordnik looks like:

There’s been enough press coverage about the general concept but what I found most fascinating was what Wordnik does for things like phrases, dates and normal search queries. Here’s what a search for “Bill Gates” returned:

In the image above you’ll see real-time search results about Bill Gates from Twitter.

And images from Flickr.

The most unique feature, however, is a small chart in the lower left corner that visualizes how many times a word has been in a particular year (shown above). Apparently in the 50’s people really liked to use the word “omnipotent“! But imagine a heat map like this, using to show the frequency of search terms or word uses in real time? Here’s the results for searching the word “twitter” which is both a brand and an actual part of the english lexicon.

This is across the span of two hundred years, what if it let us look at how many times a brand’s name was used in a day? or an hour? Wordnik crowdsources a lot of it’s information. Users add new definitions and uses, they can record their own aural pronunciations of words and they can suggest synonyms and alternative spellings in wiki-like fashion.

In the beginning of this piece I showed you the search results for searching for a non-word, a phrase or a foreign term would display similar results. It’s fascinating to think of some of these features being available to a database like Wikipedia’s. Imagine looking up words, terms, dates, phrases and getting more than just a description…actual conversations that had occurred, recordings of how to properly pronounce the persons name, frequency of the terms use in articles over the years, etc. Even without emphasis on any of those things, Wordnik still offers a great deal of utility, whether you’re looking up words or not. Essentialy Wordnik is Mahalo (the old contender for Wikipedia’s throne) for words, but I find it more fun and far more useful than I ever found Mahalo.